Interior Alaska suffered a case of weather whiplash on Tuesday, with snow falling and puddles freezing after residents recently basked in a wave of record-breaking heat.
"We were like 80 degrees and then bam, we got hit with snow," said Dawn Cranor, a clerk at the Three Bears convenience store in Tok.
Temperatures in Tok dipped to 31 degrees. The cold killed plants, irking gardeners, Cranor said.
"It's time to unpack your bunny boots!" said a Facebook photo showing the falling snow on the "Tok, Alaska" page. The picture was published just four days after a post reporting Tok temperatures at a "hot" 82 degrees.
The weather's about-face occurred when a low-pressure system in the Gulf of Alaska provided moisture for a high-pressure system from the Arctic, sweeping out the warm weather, said Benjamin Bartos, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks.
The Interior's extreme heat, including a high of 81 on Saturday in Fairbanks that broke a 101-year-record, was more unusual than the snow for this time of year, Bartos said.
On Tuesday, the band of falling snow extended north of the Alaska Range from Denali National Park and Preserve to the Canadian border. Tok got about half an inch of snow, while areas of the nearby Taylor Highway received an inch, said Bartos.
In Tok, 250 miles northeast of Anchorage, retired teacher Paul Kelley dressed in shorts and mowed strips of the snow off his green lawn, setting up what he called a silly Facebook photo-op to mark the occasion.
He has already mowed his lawn a couple of time this spring, but the temperatures were so cold Tuesday he needed a space heater to get the mower going.
"We were extremely dry and we had very high fire danger, so the moisture was a positive," he said.
Bartos said temperatures are expected to gradually warm in the Interior, with the forecast calling for mostly sunny weather in the 70s.