A Weird Winter Storm Warning in Gatlinburg: Developments, Disappointments, and Delightments

It’s been quite an interesting several days here in Gatlinburg. Some of what I’m about to write may not come as a surprise to some of you, but I just want to confirm what has been a source of disbelief for people who don’t live and work here. They say weather here is unpredictable—I’ve heard it a lot—but what happened in the last couple of days truly made me a believer in the strange, wild world of weather here in Gatlinburg.

We were getting a pretty solid heads-up forecast for a winter storm headed our way for early Monday morning. The initial predictions for snow had us at 2-5 inches of the white powder; then, they pushed it up to 4-6, with a possibility of up to 8. Uh oh, here we go!

Lately, I hadn’t been following the weather a whole lot, but when we have projections of a hefty piling of snow on the agenda, I’m watching the so-called experts’ weather charts and radars like a hawk. I knew that it was coming, so I was excited for maybe the first time in my adult life to see snow falling. What I didn’t expect was for them to be wrong…or were they really?

As expected, the snow started falling early Monday morning. I was scheduled to close that day, coming in at 1 p.m., but we closed completely for the day, so I had the entire day to document all the pretty snow that would fall on this mountain town…or would it?