The snow has disappeared,

as have the balmy temperatures!

Waking this morning and stepping outside, may bring a shock to your body. The Walpack Weather Station has recorded the sudden drop in temps overnight:

Courtesy of https://www.njweather.org/station/79

No longer the 55 degrees my thermometer had read at 7am yesterday, but 20!

Tonight we'll drop back to single digit temps and wind chills below ZERO!

For anyone thinking this weather is out of the ordinary, the state has information posted back to 2104 - and you can read the full 2015 recap. There it relates that: "The [2015] statewide average temperature of 27.7° was 3.5° below normal, making it the 32nd coldest January since records commenced in 1895."

And sadly, NE of us yesterday - an ice jam occured, closing off part of Route 209 in Westbrookville, NY. 

Today's TH-Record has a video link to a news story they posted today of people needing to be rescued from their home. By the hamlet's Post Office, an 8 foot tall wall of ice had backed up by the bridge. 

5 degree temps are expected tonight, with wind chills of negative 6.

Bundle up and take precaution of water pipes freezing, etc. - yet again!

 THINK SPRING!

It's a bit colder "up on the mountain" at High Point - which also has its own weather station off Route 23 - past the township border.

The Montague Grange, No. 140, P.O.H.  

has raffle tickets for sale at $1.00 each 

for a drawing to be held next week

on the 17th of January. 

The drawing is for Prime Time Meats

value at $ 350.00. 

Please help support our local Grange. 

If you want to buy a ticket

- please see a Grange member, 

or contact Sharon Orce.

We survived the arctic chill!

Am sure we can all now breathe a collective sigh that things didn't get much worse than they did.

 Besides, Montague didn't hit the minus 16 degrees recorded this morning at the weather station in nearby Walpack.

Over a hundred years ago, the Port Jervis

Tri-States Union Newspaper in 1904/5 related:

The Delaware a Solid Mass of lce.

It is said the condition of the Delaware

river at present is unusual, that the river

is frozen almost solid, with only a small

channel in the main body of the stream,

and that between Port Jervis and Deposit

one can cross at almost any point.

What all this pressages when the break-up 

comes, is a matter of much speculation.

Am sure the only people ever to fully welcome the deep freezes were those who harvested ice!

Back in Jan. 1893, that same newspaper reported:

 Proprietor St. John of the High Point Inn, is cutting ice from Lake Marcia and will soon have his ice house filled. 

High Point Inn  had preceded High Point Lodge / Kuser Mansion

Ice views in the Delaware River, Port Jarvis, N.Y. 

after the Flood, March 17th, 1875.

by Masterson, E. P. -- Photographer

Courtesy
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-a6e0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Should the ice begin to break up, rather than slowly thaw out, there is always a risk of ice jams forming.  One major one occured in our area in 1982.

This will give readers a sense of what can occur, as related in this excerpt from a Jan 28, 1904 article in the Tri-States Union:

Sunday at about 3 o'clook, the ice
broke up in the Delaware river, caused
by the excessive pressure of ice and water
from above. The people were on the
lookout for a break-up, and the news
quickly spread, and within a half hour,
the banks of the river were lined with
people eager to see the sight, while others
hurried to the homes of friends in the
southern part of the town and at Tri-States
to render aid, if necessary.
The ice crammed and crunched down
the Delaware, and the water rose rapidly,
and backed up in the Neversink River,
thus breaking the ice in that stream and
causing the water to rise about five feet in an hour.