Snow

Snow is a beautiful thing. Snow wraps a pretty white scarf around the sordid and everyday. It's the stuff of Cascade watersheds, the frosting on Kilimanjaro, the secret ingredient in Telluride daiquiris. Snow is to be cherished. Yet it's not snowflakes that I see drifting into Ferrari's brick courtyard on the Via Abetone, the Temple Mount in this, the Jerusalem of Red Cars. Instead, I imagine I see tiny, confetti-like news clippings from Corriere della Sera, each one telling of an American journalist who managed to plunge a Ferrari 458 Italia into a snowy mountain suckhole.

An avalanche Monday covered a section of railroad track with snow in the Valais Alps near the town of Goppenstein, blocking trains for hours but causing no injuries, a railroad spokesman said.

NEW YORK -- Matthew Grass had planned on renting a car here and driving north to see snow. But the snow came to him, falling in light, icy flakes across Times Square just hours after Grass, his wife and two daughters arrived in New York City on a week's vacation from New Orleans. Across the Northeast -- where anywhere from 1 to 3 feet of snow was predicted to fall during a major blizzard -- state and local officials issued dire warnings instructing people to stay inside and wait for the worst to pass.

Residents of the region braced for a winter storm that could dump as much as 9 inches of snow in upstate New York and northern New England today, adding a new coating to the foot or more that fell from the storm that just moved out.

Heavy snow isolated Jerusalem on Wednesday and covered the neighboring kingdom of Jordan as unusually heavy storms battered the eastern Mediterranean region. The snowstorm blanketed Jerusalem and reached as far south as Israel's Negev Desert. Police went on national TV to explain how to drive in snow--an unfamiliar experience for most Israelis. Children in Dimona threw snowballs for the first time in their lives. The Negev town reportedly last saw snow 18 years ago.

A combination of snow and sleet lingered over the eastern part of the country today, forcing schools to remain closed for a third straight day in Southern Illinois and leaving roads slick and treacherous. The slow-moving system followed nearly the same path as the storm that swept from Missouri to the Carolinas and the Virginias on Monday and early Tuesday, but it was weaker and was expected to dump only as much as four inches of new snow today.

A powerful storm dumped heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada, triggering car accidents and shutting down roads to Lake Tahoe. Several locations on Interstate 80 and U.S. Highway 50 near Placerville, Calif., were closed late Saturday afternoon because of snowfall, according to the California Highway Patrol. "It's totally nasty," said Kathi Scott of the Kingvale Shell Station west of Donner Summit. "It's coming down in bundles. Even four-wheel-drives are having trouble. It's a good day to stay inside."

Parts of Arizona remained under a winter storm warning on Monday after a snowstorm snarled traffic and forced the closure of many schools. According to the National Weather Service, heavy snow, particularly around Flagstaff and Prescott, hit much of central and eastern Arizona over the weekend and was expected to continue through Monday. The inclement weather is expected to leave the state by Tuesday -- the day of the vernal equinox , which heralds the official beginning of spring.

The blizzard that has shut down the East Coast calls for some warnings about playing in or even walking on  snow and ice. The American Assn. of Orthopedic Surgeons (and really, those docs should know) has some advice to share with the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will get injured this year. An association report on winter sports found snowboarding the No. 1 injury sport (164,002) and sledding, snow tubing and tobogganing a close second (160,020) in 2007. Here are some safety tips from the Health Notes blog of the Newport News Daily Press and practical advice on avoiding snow sport injuries from the AAOS.