Cold air pell-mell.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Snow, rain, hail, sunshine, rainbows: Lane County residents saw it all Friday. The weather radar looked like somebody threw a handful of paint on a canvas, said meteorologist Dan Keirns of the National Weather Service in Portland.

"It's a real mixed bag, enhanced a lot by the fact that the air is so cold and unstable," Keirns said.

While snow flurried in Eugene early Friday, Oakridge merely was overcast and hail clattered down in Florence.

Later in the morning when the sun peeked out in Eugene, the snow began falling in Oakridge, Florence got a smattering of rain and other coastal beaches saw a dusting of snow, Keirns said. By afternoon, hail pelted Eugene to be replaced by rain and then partly sunny skies.

About 1.5 inches of snow fell in downtown Eugene, with as much as 8 inches on the ground at higher elevations.

Portland was spared the flurries because the cold air funneled into the southern part of the Willamette Valley, Keirns said.

Up at Santiam Pass, 31 inches of snow accumulated from Wednesday afternoon to Friday

morning.

Blame the variability on the three-way collision of a northern cold front, Pacific moisture and Oregon topographical extremes, state climatologist George Taylor said.

"These clouds come floating across and dump whatever happens to be in them. It might be frozen. It might be liquid. It makes a tremendous difference where you happen to be," he said.

While most of us are thinking spring - which arrives officially on March 20 - we still have to make it through the dregs of winter.

"What we're seeing right now this late in the year, it's unusual but not unprecedented," Taylor said.

The latest snowfall date recorded in Eugene is March 25, 1972.

While the snow closed schools throughout the area and sent cars skidding off highways, there were no serious accidents reported in Eugene or Springfield.

On Interstate 5 near the exit to 30th Avenue, two tractor-trailer rigs and a car collided in the northbound lane just after 6 a.m. A few minutes later a Greyhound bus slid into another vehicle trying to avoid the I-5 wreck, but no one was hurt, state Department of Transportation spokesman Joe Harwood said.

"People, thankfully, were going slow," Eugene Police spokeswoman Kerry Delf said. She reminded drivers to take it easy on slick streets.

"Don't drive if you don't have to and if you do, drive carefully," she said.

While the weather will ease up, this rash of storms isn't quite done with us.

"It's just going to be blotchy like this for the next couple of days," Keirns said, "although you're not going to see any accumulations like we've had."

Today, brace for the possibility of thunderstorms with a high of 46 degrees and lows tonight just below freezing at 31 degrees. Sunday expect scattered showers with a high of 47 and a low of 30.

BY THE NUMBERS: Snowfall in March

3

Times it has snowed later than March 10 in Eugene since 1939

1.5

Record snowfall in inches for March 10, set in 1954

25th

of March: latest date for measurable snow in Eugene, set in 1972

31

Santiam Pass snowfall in inches, Wednesday night to Friday morning

CAPTION(S):

Jack Carol (left) snow duels on Friday morning with Jordan Seidmon and Lizzie Hager. With schools closed, the Eugene students had nothing but time to carry on a battle near Spencer Butte. Edward Clarke and his dog, Chez, enjoy a snowy walk along Hawkins Lane on Friday morning. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard