Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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To Roanoke Valley folks: all those seemingly exaggerated snow reports to our north on Saturday: Those were real!

It's not that I would expect Roanoke folks to question the veracity of our neighbors in Bath, Rockbridge and northern Bedford counties, but with temperatures sitting in the 40s and barely a few sprinkles here on Saturday, reports of up to 10 inches of snow an hour's drive away seemed a bit hard for some to believe.

Maybe it was a little easier to believe because we could look up to the tops of some of the higher ridges just to our south and see a coating of white, near the top of Poor Mountain, for instance.

Overnight, when we in the valley got our best rain of March -- a whopping 0.15 inch that doubled our monthly total -- a lot of that fell as snow a little higher up.

As for the bigger snow to our north, I know firsthand because I got in the middle of it.

Expecting a nice little 1- to 2-inch light coating of snow in the higher elevations, I headed to the Peaks of Otter on Saturday to hike the Flat Top trail. I planned to hike about halfway with the time I had available before I had to come to work, just far enough for a good bit of exercise and to enjoy the scenery of what might be our area's last brush with winter for several months.

When I got to the trailhead, a few miles north of the lodge, I could tell that there had been a bit more snow that I would have expected under the circumstances, maybe about 3 to 4 inches. But the sun was trying to peek out and the snow was beginning to fall in blobs off the trees, as temperatures hung precariously close to 32 degrees.

I started on my hike thinking it might get slushy and muddy fast if the sun came out. But it didn't take long to change that thinking entirely, as wave after wave of heavy snow engulfed the mountain. This was by far the heaviest snow I had seen all season.

Of course, I enjoyed it. As a weather buff, I enjoy extreme weather, and the beauty of a heavy snowfall brings more personal joy than almost any extreme weather.

With almost no wind, the snow was collecting on every branch, creating a beautiful lacework pattern. All the boulders on the mountainside were rounded-off blobs of white. The world and all its distractions were hushed.

By the time I reached the second wooden bench, or about the halfway point, the snow depth was 6 to 8 inches at about 3,500 feet of elevation. And the snow was coming down in a white sheet I could barely see through.

I worked my way slowly back to the trailhead through the near-whiteout. My brown dog, Cindy, had a white stripe down her back from the snow, and I had about a half-inch accumulation on the outer shell of my layered apparel. I found my vehicle with an inch of fresh snow covering it, and more importantly, the roads that were just wet with a little slush when I arrived were now solid white.

I did more than a little slipping and sliding getting back down the mountain, and this was with four-wheel drive. A park ranger's car ahead of me went into a full spin. Not long after, a plow arrived to clear the snow on Virginia 43 down the mountain, and I was able to get to the bottom, where it was still snowing hard but not sticking much on the roads.

The big flakes were pouring down in Bedford as well, with only light slush accumulations on grass and trees.

By the time I got home, it seemed odd, looking around, that I could have been in such a snowstorm just a little while earlier.

But a cold swirl of air several miles up, called an upper-level low, and just a couple of thousand feet of elevation meant a world of difference on an early spring Saturday.