Paradise, the Snowiest Place on Earth
Near Ashford, Washington
The meadow called Paradise earned its name in the summer of eighteen eighty five, when Virinda Longmire, daughter in law of the settler James Longmire, looked out across its rolling fields of wildflowers and said the place was paradise. In the short alpine summer, those meadows explode with color, avalanche lilies and lupine and paintbrush blooming in a rush before the snow returns. And return it does, in staggering amounts.
During the winter of nineteen seventy one and nineteen seventy two, Paradise recorded one thousand one hundred and twenty two inches of snow, more than ninety three feet, in a single season. At the time it was a world record for measured snowfall anywhere on the planet. That record was later edged out by nearby Mount Baker in the late nineteen nineties, but Paradise remains one of the snowiest inhabited spots in North America, averaging well over five hundred inches a year.
It is a place of extremes stacked upon each other, deep silent winters buried in white, and brief brilliant summers when the whole meadow blazes with flowers beneath the glaciers. Few places on Earth swing so dramatically between the two.
