Winter sees warm start
After the longest night of the year, northern Maine’s weather is bringing some days bound to feel like spring, but without a snowpack.
High temperatures potentially reaching into the 40s on Thursday and Friday could come close to the National Weather Service’s 48 degree record in Caribou for those two days, when the high is usually 23 and the ground has around eight inches of snow. Since 1939, only six Christmases in Caribou have had less than an inch of snow on the ground, according to the NWS.
Snowmobilers and skiers may have been able to explore on the little snow that has fallen and stuck so far — and depending on the temperatures, some of Monday and Tuesday’s snow could stay. Bigrock Mountain is planning on opening some of its slopes on Saturday, but that’s later than hoped for. The Aroostook League Alpine Ski Race, which was scheduled for Dec. 26 at Bigrock, was was moved to Lonesome Pine Trails in Fort Kent and then cancelled ahead of the forecast.
While the winter days near and above freezing are a bit weird, they’re also opportunities to spend more time outside — walking, hiking, fishing, preparing next year’s garden, bird watching or sky gazing.
At Aroostook State Park, the notch and ridge trails, with just a few inches of snow on the ground, offer navigable, crisp forays on the forested Quoggy Jo Mountain. On New Year’s Day, the Aroostook Birders club is leading an annual bird count around Presque Isle, and is meeting at Tim Hortons at 6:45.
In the sky, the winter is starting with a full moon — the first on Christmas since 1977 — and then will cycle through dark stretches showing the brightest of night stars.
Among those with binoculars or a telescope, Larry Berz, the planetarium director at the Francis Malcolm Science Center, will be looking for the comet Catalina in pre-dawn skies through the rest of the month and January.
For the unaided eye, the new year also brings Venus and Saturn appearing as the brightest stars in the east before sunrise and “doing a dance” at their conjuncture on Jan. 9. In the third week of January, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will all be able to be seen in the same sky.
Another star to watch is the Francis Malcolm Science Center, the 32-year-old Easton museum that is leading a “Galaxy of Stars” fundraising campaign to stay open through the end of June. The museum is hoping to raise $50,000 by the end of January to stay open during the rest of the school year and to take those months to pursue corporate and grant funding.
