Still looked very skiable, in fact, despite now being a month past the end of Wolf Creek's ski season. I moved down to the far end of the lower parking lot, to get a better view to the southeast and to get farther from road noise. Gradually with time, the snow increased, and became quite heavy for a while:
It was very pretty with the fresh snow on the trees - I'll take a view like that any time of year - but there was no thunder. By the time the picture just above was taken, it was snowing so hard that you could no longer see the ski runs - just a very fuzzy view of the base lodges. Later, when I got home, I looked at the lightning tracker and saw that there had been one strike in the snow around 15 miles south of the ski area - much too far away to get any thunder at the ski area. While I was there, I would estimate that it snowed up to a half inch, but it did not accumulate much on pavement and coming back, US 160 was just slushy between the ski area and the pass and just wet once you got much west of the pass. It had, however, been plowed due to earlier snow.
The lighter area under the precipitation, close to the ground, is the level at which it changed from mainly frozen precipitation to rain. So not making it to the ground as snow or graupel yet, but it might as it moved up into higher elevations. And there were a couple rumbles of thunder. So I decided to scrap fishing and make it a thundersnow chase. The heaviest of the core would pass somewhere northwest of my location, and Piedra Road, which I was right next to, goes northwest up into higher elevations close to 8,000 feet. I headed up that way, stopping once in a place close to where I should have stayed (Piedra Road and North Pagosa Blvd.). Got out, heard thunder, and thought it was still passing northwest of there (it was not) and went a couple miles farther northwest. There, I realized that the track of the core was going to take it south of that location, so I doubled back to a high spot southeast of Lake Hatcher. I set up for video, and soon got my favorite type of oddball precipitation, what I call "thunderslush" - winter precipitation mixed with rain, with thunder. Started out a mix of rain and graupel, may have briefly gone to mainly rain, then to a mix of rain, graupel, and wet snow - and thunder! Here is my video:
Thunderslush video:
At the very end, just after the thunder, it went to nearly all graupel/snow pellets, and then it was over and the sky began to clear as the storm continued northeast. When I got back down near home, there was a nice view of the retreating storm:
When I got home, it still looked pretty electrically active on the lightning tracker, which also confirmed there had been lots of electrical activity all around the Pagosa Springs area. My wife said there had been a lot of thunder at the house, but she thought just rain, not graupel or snow. These confirmed what I thought, which was that there had probably been quite a bit of thunder I did not hear when I was driving.
Looking at it on the screen of my camera, I was a bit perplexed because it was much more colorful than what I could see with my eyes. I later learned that this is because the human eye is not as good as a camera at detecting color in low light, such as auroras near the horizon at lower latitudes. I should have remembered this from photographing a comet a few years ago and realized the same thing was going on, but at first I did not. Just before I took the picture above, while I was still getting set up, there had been an even brighter area visible through a narrow opening in the clouds below where the pink/purple colors are in the picture above, but by the time I was ready to take pictures, the opening in the clouds there had mostly closed. One thing I like about this picture is that I managed to capture a vertical beam of light in the aurora. I had not noticed that viewing it with the naked eye. This picture was taken at F/5.6, ISO 6400, 10 second exposure. No adjustments to color or brightness.
The clouds continued to move northeast, as had been the case all day, and the opening through which I took the picture above narrowed and shifted closer to the northern horizon. That allowed a somewhat different view of the aurora, capturing the pink/purple higher in the sky with a more greenish color closer to the horizon:
This is something that was evident in many pictures of the aurora that I later saw online, particularly ones taken at lower latitudes. I am sure this would have been much more evident with fully clear skies, but I had to work with the skies I had. All in all, I was pretty happy with my aurora photography efforts. In both of these pictures, but particularly the second one, note the reflection of the pink/purple colors of the aurora on the water near the far side of the lake, where there was a slight ripple on the water. I went back out and tried again around 11:30, but by then, clouds were completely hiding the northern sky, so I called an end to a long but very exciting day. And try to get some sleep ahead of the next day, which also turned out to be pretty exciting.