JP Livin!: Thank you, snow storm!!

After a WONDERFUL, long weekend with the Ruby Jewels in New Orleans, filled with lots of delicious food, walks in the sunshine, laughter, and quality time spent with 3 amazing friends, I was preparing myself for a tiring (we didn't sleep very much in NOLA) and cold week at school.

The first day back, everybody in room 304 was a little sleepy and not quite ready for further exploration of multiplication and division! Somehow we all managed to make it through the day and that is when we got the first wind of a huge snowstorm heading our direction. Instantly thoughts of school being cancelled popped into every teacher's mind in the Missoula area, but I did not let it get the best of me because I have been told that snow days do not happen very often here! In Oregon, if 1 snowflake fell from the sky, school was cancelled. Waking up to a little snow on Wednesday, I got excited and was waiting for a call from the district, saying school was cancelled, no such luck! It did, however, snow all day on Wednesday and into the night. We woke up Thursday morning (as Justin posted previously) to quite a few inches of snow. The call from the district came, with a message of a 2 hour delay for the students, teachers should report at regular time :( After digging my car out of the snow (thanks, Justin!) I drove very slowly to school preparing for some very excited 3rd graders! After half the staff had reported, we were called to the office, where we were told the district had decided to just cancel school for the day, since the weather report was not looking much better for the rest of the day! You might think there is a lot of excitement in the halls of an Elementary school on the last day of school, you should have heard it on this wintry day in January! What was I going to do with this free day.....
Justin and I decided to do our first snowshoe adventure of the season (it had been a very dry winter up until this point), we were both curious of how much snow was on Sentinel, so decided to head that

direction! (Side note: Justin had mentioned in his previous post that he ran a sluggish 49 minute time from our front door to the top of Sentinel. That is NOT sluggish, we have to keep in mind "Justin time"! Most of you can probably recall hiking the "M", when you have come to visit, running Sentinel, does not mean stopping at the "M", it ends up being a 2 1/2 mile run with 2,000 feet of elevation gain, which most people could not dream of doing in 49 minutes!) Anyways, we strapped on our snowshoes and headed up the left side of Sentinel, where we were greeted with 6-10 inches of untouched snow! With Justin breaking trail up the North ridge, we made it 3/4 of the way up Sentinel when we (I) decided we should make a nice long loop out of the hike, instead of heading straight up! It continued to snow during our hike, at one point, I turned to look back out over Missoula and could only see white clouds and bit and pieces of buildings below.

Wintry Missoula

We continued with our hike through tons of untouched, beautiful snow! I had just been telling Justin how I wanted to experience a time when it would start to snow and just keep snowing for a long period of time, I got my wish!! It continued to snow all day and into the night. Late Thursday afternoon all the Lowell teachers were texting back and forth, placing bets on whether we would have school on Friday or not. No one wanting to get their hopes up for another snow day, but the call came, announcing the school closures for Friday! So, after preparing to have a long tiring week at work, we were pleasantly surprised to have a 4 day weekend!

Enjoying the snowy day!

The black dot is Justin, wayyyy ahead of me!

Now, with another free day ahead of us, we were trying to figure out what snow filled activity would fill our day on Friday! We decided another snowshoe adventure would be fun! We got friends Amy, Mary and Zeke to join us on a Marshall Canyon trek. After getting stuck twice in our alley way, one time having to get pulled by a very nice man with a rope and Chevy 2500, we made it up to Marshall. Where we got to see the dark clouds part ways to blue sky! Justin led us on another beautiful hike up and around Marshall.