In America, winter is
different everywhere. In the south, like New Orleans,
Florida, and Los Angeles, it is still very warm. Those
places are like Okinawa – they are close to the equator,
and never get too cool. In the north, though, the winter is
very cold. New York and Boston both are below 0 degrees
celcius for most of the winter.
The coldest places, though, are in the center of the
country. When a place is close to the ocean, its
temperature doesn’t change as much as it does further away.
In the center of the country there are no oceans near –
only wind. It can get to –30 or even –40 degrees celcius!
And again, some of the coldest places in the center of the
country are the highest ones – the Rocky Mountains.
I lived in Colorado working in the Rocky Mountains for one
winter. I worked at a ski resort as a snowmobile guide.
Every morning I could go skiing, and every afternoon and
night I took tourists around the mountain on snowmobiles.
My mountain’s name was Vail – it was about 4000 meters
tall. There were mountains nearby almost 5000 meters high!
The sunset is always beautiful, those very high mountains
with very white snow that would change colors, from yellow
to orange to pink to blue to purple to black. And there
were many other colors in between!
As great as the sunsets are, my favorite part of Vail was
the stars at night. On top of such a tall mountain, when
the temperature is about –25 degrees celcius and there are
no lights around, you can see all the stars in the sky.
There are so many! I never got tired of looking at them,
and I never felt cold when I did.