The night before this photo was taken, we were in the warm outdoor pool at the Sierra Hot Springs [http://www.sierrahotsprings.org/] in Sierraville (about 30 minutes north of Truckee) when a light rain turned into a light snowfall. Back at Packer Lake Lodge [http://www.packerlakelodge.com/] in the Sierra Buttes Lakes Basin area, we awoke to this scene--an inch of powder under a clear blue sky. Later that morning, as the summer weather returned (it was actually the first weekend of October), I hiked to the top of the Buttes and encountered drifts of snow three and four inches deep on the trail.