A "slushy inch" will be the new "1950" that your children will speak of.

He has an unusually extreme sarcasm which is hard to see sometimes.

You just don’t get the humor

Yup. Leavenworth is about the same as Cle Elum in the winter even though Cle Elum is quite a bit higher. I really wish they had a weather station in Liberty. That place just seems like the perfect location for cold air trapping and massive radiational cooling. I'll bet they've pulled off a -40 or two in the past. I used to know a guy over there who kept track of the temps and he would tell me about the low to mid 20s he saw in August a few times. Never thought to ask what kind of winter numbers he had recorded though. I was much younger then and just didn't think of it.

Yeah the high plateau pretty much puts them in a goldilocks zone where they are just far enough east of the crest to have a wholly eastside temperature profile, while far enough west to largely avoid the rainshadow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burney,_California#Climate is a very good climate for being at just 3k elevation in northern CA, kind of in the same goldilocks zone (although the data PoR is outdated, it's a bit warmer than this now).