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I was in the Smoky Mountains one year in early April. The fresh, light green leaves of early spring were everywhere.
One day we drove up to the top of Clingman's Dome which is the highest point in Tennessee. As we were gaining altitude, the trees got progressively more barren. It still looked like winter at the top, and the only green was from the few evergreens.
I live in the Tennessee valley not far from the Smokies. Our climate in the valley is similar to everywhere else in the interior south. However when you go into the mountains it can be like driving 600 miles north. As you said the trees are weeks behind us in the spring. We are green by late March here, up there it’s mid to later April. In winter the mountains often are covered in visible snow when we are in the 50s. During summer one can escape a 97 Degree day by driving up there to find its 75. It really is amazing, the southern Appalachians are one of the few places in the east where the mountains are high enough to provide for that kind of mountain climate difference with the surrounding countryside.
In 2012, spring came unprecedentedly early to Minneapolis. I remember people lying on the beach at Bde Maka Ska in the middle of March. Crabapples were blooming by the end of the month (normally it's early-mid May). And then it just stayed exceptionally warm the rest of spring! Never seen anything like it before.
2012 was excessively warm throughout the eastern half of the US, the summer of that same year was filled with triple digit heat, even far to the north.
Charleston really has had no winter this year other than like 3 days at Christmas. Christmas Eve didn’t get above freezing. Barely any cold snaps at all.
Trees are already starting to bloom here and everything turning green with a week or so left in February.
I've been very sensitive to this the past three years, starting with the year of the onset of the pandemic, as I did a ton of solo walking in the spring of 2020 and was eagerly awaiting the return of foliage. There were plenty of mid-late April days where I was expressing disappointment to myself (and pretty much only myself!) about the lack of greenery...and this was repeated, albeit with increasing 'distractions' each year, in the Aprils of 2021 and 2022. I think that a lasting consequence of the pandemic is that I now have it ingrained in me to pay attention to the 'leaf out' time (it's my one symptom of Long Covid, I guess, heh), and so it will be again this spring....
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