107 deg f

North Seattle, no air conditioning:

Outside: 100F+
Upstairs office: 95F+
Main floor kitchen: 90F+
Basement: 75F+

I rent a small storage space near my house and it measured 93F yesterday afternoon. Today I'm going to check the Mountaineers Archives at Magnuson Park and see how bad it is. We have no climate control in the (upstairs) storage room which contains 100 years of Mountaineer Annuals and several photo collections. I'm not optimistic.

My place at Hyak when I checked today was 85 outside and 75 inside. I wouldn't be too concerned about glaciers with this short-term warm spell. There is still snow up at Summit West, about 5' deep from the 1/4 pipe even with this heat wave.

Lowell, I hope the archives do ok. The photo's I'd guess are the most vulnerable of the items.

The lake sure is high for this time of year. Both boat launches at Lake Keechelus are still under water which is very rare when heading into August. I snapped this picture this afternoon.
farm3.static.flickr.com/2582/3773402627_91b8b83ca7.jpg

Some of the records in this heat wave were amazing, especially in Western Washington. The highest I saw perusing NWS records was 109 degrees near Longview according to NWS records. Enumclaw had six straight days over 90. Several stations had three straight days over 100. Seattle (Sea Tac) has had 17 days over 80 and 5 over 90 this July with the alltime record of 103 beating the old record by three degrees. Interestingly Eastern Washington was no warmer.

The mountains were a different story. I spent five days camped near Spray Park near 7000'. Although where I camped was cooler because of a nearby snowfield open terrain near ridges was very hot especially Tuesday morning. Even above 8000' it was very hot. As the thermal trough came through Wednesday thunderstorms formed by 10 or 11 AM. I had 2 hours or so of hail as large as 3/8" and heavy rain with continuous thunder and lighning for three hours. Although I had about 1-1/2" of rain just a few miles away at Mowich Lake it remained dry.

The glaciers are really taking it in the shorts. Rainier on the Mowich and Liberty ridge side is about as melted off as it can get. The Russell Glacier is already about 1/3 old ice and even at Liberty Cap there is mostly old ice showing.