For those of you not living here in Portland, we’ve got a pretty mild climate.  We get rain in the winter, with the occasional cold snap.  Maybe snow or freezing rain every third winter or so.  (Last winter’s Snowpocalypse, as my friend Sarah called it, does not count.)  But right now, along with much of the country, we’re going through a pretty harsh cold snap.

However (this is not a weather report) one of the great things about this particular cold snap has been how clear and beautiful it’s been.

On a clear day in Portland, the mountain is out.  When we say that locally it means Mt. Hood is visible.  (In fact, there are three volcanic peaks that one can see on a good day from Portland – Mt. Hood to the west, Mt. Saint Helens to the north, and Mt. Adams farther to the east in Washington State.  But I digress.)

The other afternoon rushing from one meeting to the next, atop one of my favorite local parking garages I snapped this photo of the lovely Mt. Hood with the Hawthorne Bridge in the foreground.   Mt. Hood was radiant with its new blanket of snow.  Such a treat.

Can you just feel the crisp breeze blowing across the Willamette River here?