More Than 50 Shades of Gray: a Cloudy Winter in Bellingham

My college English professor once told me that a great way to hook people on a story is to begin with a personal anecdote. Though now that I think about it, he also told me that bacon was bad for me and that my writing was good, so I suppose I should take anything that came out of his mouth with a grain of sodium chloride. But heck, I’m even prefacing the primary anecdote with this secondary anecdote so you should probably just read anyways.

Let me set the scene for you: Bellingham, Washington; nestled along the coast where the Strait of Georgia and the Strait of Juan De Fuca merge together to form a bewildering assortment of coves, islands, bays, and inlets, where half the license plates you see on the highway are from British Columbia, in the only place where the occasionally explosive Cascade Range makes its way allllllll the way down to the beach, and where the nearly 11,000 foot ice sculpted summit of Mt. Baker dominates the view from town on 100% of the 25% of the days out of the year when there is actually a view from town. (Read that again if you need to…) You see, Bellingham is really cloudy. It also happens to be where I currently reside. I’m not trying to knock Bellingham; it’s a great town in a myriad of different ways. Really great. The pictures on this page should prove that. But it’s really, really, REALLY cloudy. Especially in the winter.  When I first got here I had a professor tell me that a sunny day is a perfectly legitimate excuse for turning in an assignment late. Many days I wake up, open the blinds, and think that I must be watching an old episode of Gilligan’s Island…you know, the one’s before they started making it in color?  In fact, the official motto of Bellingham is “The City of Subdued Excitement”.  I am convinced that this is mainly because it’s a little hard to be anything other than subdued when a gray pall can settle over the city for weeks on end. It’s like nature’s Vallium.

Cedar Lake, a short hike from the outskirts of Bellingham, after a rare low-altitude snowfall.

Anyways, the anecdote. Upon the advice of  professors, students, and other acquaintances familiar with the winter…er…”conditions”…here, way back in September (one of only three months out of the year where it is statistically more likely to be partly cloudy or sunny than completely overcast) I made a visit to Rite-Aid with the intent of purchasing some Vitamin D tablets. Now let me assure you that the vitamin section at Rite-Aid is the very epitome of robust; my local store stocks about eight different complete lines of nutritional supplement products. Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, Vitamin Q, calcium, magnesium, iron, glucosamine, corn silk, echinacea, fish oil, cod oil, beet juice, cow bile, pig urine extract…it was all there. Except for the Vitamin D, whose slot on the shelf belonging to each and every brand was completely empty. An omen if I’ve ever seen one.

Now that I have (hopefully) made my point, the question becomes: can we quantify just how cloudy Bellingham is? On the surface, one would think that composing a list of the cloudiest cities in the United States would be a relatively straightforward exercise. You would be wrong. It turns out that a variety of methods exist to generate such a list. One can, for example, calculate the total number of overcast hours per year expressed as a percentage of possible daylight hours (if that made any sense at all). Others prefer instead to count simply the number of days in which the Sun remains hidden behind clouds for the entire day, or the number of days in which the sky is overcast for more than 50% of the daytime hours. And none of this even begins to take into account this potentially thorny issue: what constitutes “cloudy”, exactly?  Should “partly cloudy” count as “cloudy” or “sunny” in a tally? One imagines that the answer to this depends on weather the meteorologist undertaking this task is more of a “glass half empty” or “glass half full” kind of person. And what about night?  Do we care if it is cloudy at night? Or are we only interested to know how much sunshine we are losing? As an astronomy enthusiast, I demand that the percentage of cloudy nighttime hours be taken into account. As you can see, madness is never that far away.

Looking down onto the clouds and fog from Samish Overlook. Oftentimes the best way to get out of the clouds is simply to hike above them! The summits of two of the San Juan Islands, Orcas and Lummi, also poke up out of the clouds.

The lack of any well-established protocols when it comes to defining “cloudiness” leaves ample opportunity for cities who rank highly on one list to try and come up with a new way of calculating the list that moves them down a few spots. Or, ideally, out of the top 10 entirely. After all, you don’t see too many glossy tourist brochures exclaiming “Come visit the 3rd cloudiest city in Washington and enjoy a vacation without the hassle of having to reapply sunscreen every 3 hours!”  Catchy as it sounds, it just doesn’t sell. (However, if you happen to be a tourism exec from Aberdeen, WA and you are interested in licensing this slogan for use in your promotional materials, please contact me using the oh-so-appropriately named “Contact” link above!) Regardless of which metric you use though, Bellingham, Washington generally ranks near the top of such lists. If it doesn’t, chances are the makers of the list are interpreting the word “city” rather loosely and including every little hamlet and village on the Olympic Peninsula in their calculations, yet another devious method of getting yourself off the list.

Austin Creek Falls, on a cloudy yet photographically conducive day.

The majestic Mt. Baker and Twin Sisters in the Cascade Range, just east of Bellingham. A shame that they’re not visible more often.

To give you some perspective on my rant, I feel obligated to disclose that I grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, a city that receives, on average, more than 300 days of sunshine per year. Such a concept is about as foreign to Western Washingtonians as a hurricane warning is to Saskatchewanians. The rain here is different too. During a lecture on precipitation last quarter, one of my professors asked the class, composed almost entirely of western Washingtonians, if anyone had ever experienced a “thunderstorm“.  Less than half of the class raised their hands. More often than not, we experience what someone in New Zealand would call “pissing”, a steady, extremely light rain that that lasts for days and yet somehow  manages to thoroughly permeate everything with dampness despite never requiring you to change your windshield wiper setting from “intermittent” to “warp speed”.   However, when the rain finally ceases and the clouds part, the emotions experienced is roughly on par with the feeling that Arizonans get when it rains for the first time in months. Everyone just sort of stops whatever it is that they are doing (including driving apparently…as much as it rains here, you’d think people would be better at driving in it) and goes wandering around outside looking up at the sky, squinting, and trying to figure out what the hell is happening.

And then there’s me. While everyone else stumbles around in disbelief, I grab my camera, put on my hiking boots, and head to the nearest beach, mountain, waterfall, overlook, or trail to enjoy and photograph a majestic landscape that truly deserves to be uncloaked and put on display far more often than it is. But naturally, I do all of this in an extremely subdued manner.

Sunset at low tide in Chuckanut Bay.

When it’s sunny, the Chuckanut Mountains just south of Bellingham provide excellent views of a snow-capped Mt. Baker.