It has come into my thoughts recently that I have always enjoyed a good fog. Especially I enjoy a walk in a cool, foggy morning. Or a night fog stroll, on a semi-lit street. And now my thoughts are leading me to planning some leisure travel to experience some nice soft weather.
So, who’s got good fog? When’s your fog season? Share some of your fog related anecdotes, and musings. Let us make this a fog appreciation thread.
Jack
Providing I’m not driving in it, it’s nice. We get it a bit at this time of year (winter) in Sydney’s western suburbs. When I used to live in the eastern part of the city (close to the ocean) it was rare. Here it’s a night time thing, and the fog lifts shortly after sunrise. In the Blue Mountains, further west of Sydney, fog is very, very common. Up there, it’s real pea-souper stuff, can happen nearly all year* and often doesn’t lift until nearly lunchtime. It makes driving a nightmare - often a choice of a little over walking pace or just pulling over and waiting - but it’s lovely sitting in one of the pubs or coffee shops with a roaring fire, just looking at the umm… “view” through the window. If you arrive up there early enough in the day, you can climb well above the fog as it sits in the gorges, which is nice. There is one spot where the train travels very close to the edge of a cliff, and above fog it os just like being at high altitude in an aircraft. Quite cool.
So I love fog. I love frosts. But for some reason snow is just ‘meh’.
*Other times, the place is on fire. 
Come to Monterey. Every single gall-dang day of the year, you can get bitch-slapped by a cloud. It gets old after awhile, but you tourists seem to like it. Especially when it’s hot pretty much everywhere in the whole world except in Monterey, where it’s our usual 50 degrees. Year 'round. Always. Ever. 50 degrees.
Did I mention always?
I live in a small fog-prone valley. Even when the surrounding countryside is clear, we’ll often have a thick blanket following up the creek. Some evenings, you can watch it swirl up from the main body of the river, sprialling and tumbling towards you. Great fun.
Does make for a dangerous stretch of road, where people hit a sudden fog wall at 80mph.
I had a great morning fog-walk when I was spending the weekend in Saint John, new brunswick. Can’t testify to how much of it they get. 
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park lays claim to a fair amount of fog, although it’s more like moisture rising from the vegetation. During my backpacking trips there (quite a while ago) it was quite common to be walking in the clouds or mist or fog or whatever. Cool, too.
Further south in the Tennessee mountains, toward Chattanooga, there have been some deadly fogs. Multiple car pileups on the interstates in the early mornings especially.
Around these parts it’s folklore that the number of fogs in August will determine the number of snows in the next winter. I rarely count them so I can’t say yea or nay to that.
Coastal Oregon, here. In the winter we get a cold, penetrating, water-droplets-collecting-on-your-face-and-running-down-your-collar kind of fog, which, while rather pretty, is not much fun to be walking around in. (It does make a nice change from torrential rain, sometimes, I guess.) But sometimes in the summertime, when it’s really hot inland, we get a very nice gentle ocean fog that bathes us with coolness.
I used to live in the mountains of Idaho, and in the spring and winter we’d get a wonderful fog rising up from the surface of the lakes and rivers. Beautiful.
Spring is our best fog season, though we get some in the summer and fall too. Halifax isn’t great for it, but down on the South Shore where I grew up…perfect.
The Puget Sound area of Western Washington gets some heavy fog It’s a killer on the freeways, I often found myself creeping home from work at 25-30 mph on I-5 with my eyes glued to the white line on the outside edge of the road. Otherwise, it was beautiful. For a while I lived on an old farmstead in Stevens Pass,we had seven acres with a river passing along the back of the property. Every night the fog would roll in off the river, it was very pretty, and awesome to watch and wander around in.
Here on the island we are often "socked in’ by fog. Usually just the regular kind, but in the very cold days of winter we sometimes get ice fog. Here we can be having the most beautiful, sunny, warm day, and around suppertime there will be a darkness coming in from one direction…a huge fogbank that rolls in and obliterates everything from view. From the standpoint of “fog is cool, and it’s fun to take a walk in” it’s awesome. For boats and airplanes, and people wanting/needing to travel off-island, it’s not so much of a good thing.
I do like the fog though. I used to live on the tallest hill here (they call it a mountain, but it’s not) and I would watch the fog coming in. It was like living in an eagle’s nest as I was above the fog, and it swirled around like clouds.
As a matter of fact, we are socked in right now!
I spent 3 days at O’Hare waiting to fly into Seattle because of fog at Sea-Tac airport. When we finally did fly out we were almost redirected to Portland when the fog began thickening again.
The good: Northwest Airlines put everyone up at the Hilton for 2 nights, bought all our meals and even reserved a lounge with all drinks on the house.
The bad: No clean underwear for 3 days plus I was stuck in a US Navy dress blue uniform. The airplane the flew us from Chicago to Seattle left before any liquor carts could be loaded. Imagine flying in a fully loaded 747 with no booze. And a Navy officer chewed me out at the baggage claim because of my haggardly appearance. I ignored him a walked away.
Las Vegas doesn’t have much fog (no water in the desert, ya know) but I have great fog anytime I want with my Jem Roadie X. These babies rock. I can fill an arena up with Split Pea Fog in less than 3 minutes.
I grew up in San Francisco, so fog makes me feel all homey. We get some nice fog off the lake here in Chicago in the spring a lot, and randomly throughout the year. We had a real foggy day just a couple weeks ago, a little break in the heat wave. I’ve seen the fog roll in over the skyline, which is almost frightening.
I went to college in Santa Cruz, CA, which has lots of fabulous views of Monterey Bay - assuming the bay isn’t shrouded in fog. I used to think it looked like The Nothing, from The Neverending Story - this huge bank of fog, just sitting there, waiting to envelop us.
Um. This post came off creepier than intended. I like fog!
I’m taking morning classes at a university about an hour west of Asheville, up in the Appalachians, and I’ve got just about perfect fog on the drive.
Which is to say, it’s not yet been so bad as to present a danger, but sometimes as I curl around a bend, I can see a delicate blanket of fog draped at the base of the quiet mountains ahead. And I smile, and love my home.
Daniel
Here, it’s really just the west half of the city that gets fogged in, on the ocean side of Twin Peaks. It makes for a beautiful scene from the east, seeing the horizon gradually change from houses on the hills to this big, gray blur, with the Sutro Tower struggling to stay visible. (That’s a 977 foot tower on top of a ~700 foot hill.)
We used to get those along highway 80 leading into Sacramento. Every couple few years, there’d be a huge pileup on the freeway when everyone, going 80 MPH, hit a fog bank. Sometimes in the winter it gets cold enough for black ice to form, and that coupled with a sudden pea-soup fog, is all she wrote.
Funny, i’ve lived around Monterey all of my life and we haven’t had fog every single day of the year. In fact, spring and fall are usually when we don’t get more than a few days of fog and we have sun and our warmest temperatires. It’s also not always around 50 degrees either. Maybe if you live inside of the pine forest, deep inside a cave, with a cold river running through it it is. In fact, right now even with the fog it’s 63 degrees. The average is between 60 and 70 degrees. You should be lucky, when the north eastern part of Monterey gets sun, where I live, up in Marina, the fog is usually rolling in.
As you know, Marina isn’t Monterey, and even Monterey isn’t Monterey, everywhere, all the time. But I’ve always lived near, or on, the top of the hill that is, essentially, the Monterey Peninsula, and yes, we get clouds passing right in front of us, pretty much every day of the year.
Is it always 50 degrees? Well, maybe I was exaggerating a bit there, but not much.
We do get lots of sun, and standing right in the sun, it might feel like 70 degrees or so, without a breeze, it might even feel like 75-80, but take one step out of the sun, into some shade, and you’re instantly right back in 50-some degree temps. 60 at most.
It’s frickin’ cold here dude. Pretty? Yes. Lots of sun? Yes. Cold? Yes. Clouds that float past you as you’re walking down the sidewalk? Yes.
If you don’t believe me, hang out pretty much any afternoon at the corner of Prescott Ln. & Forest Ave.
Bakersfield has a lot of fog. It’s about the most interesting thing there. (OK, well, there’s Dewar’s and the Basque restaurant. And a nice quilt shop.) In fact, the hockey team is called the Fog, which doesn’t exactly give a combatant impression. So, go to Bakersfield.
We get some fog, especially out in the farming areas near the Sacramento River. But not often.
My dad was stationed at an air base at Fairbanks, Alaska during the Cold War. Fairbanks made an ideal site because it lies in a depression sheltered from the Arctic winds but still allowed quick interception of cross-polar bombers.
But because of its climate, there was often a thick fog that coated the ground to the 3-foor level. Clear and bright above it, but dense as cotton from your hips on down; and what was really creepy, my mom recalls, was that when you went out walking in it, wild dogs would come swarming around you. So long as you kept upright and moving, you’d be okay, but if you slipped on hidden ice you’d probably be in big trouble.
Most of Hawaii gets no fog.
