I’m from Huntington WV, but have spent a lot of time in Columbus.  At first glance, I would think the former would be colder and get more snow due to its location in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Columbus is a little further north, but again, I always assumed my hometown should have more intense winters, but it doesn’t.

I’ve wondered this for years.

Every time I drive north from Huntington toward Columbus in the winter, something shifts. The air feels sharper. The snow seems deeper. The cold lingers longer. It’s subtle at first, but by the time you’re fully into central Ohio, it feels like you’ve crossed into a different climate entirely. This seems to happen once I get past Chilicothe, where the rugged terrain I’m accustomed to pretty much comes to end from there all the way to Columbus.

I’ve always asked myself:

Is that real — or is that just perception?

My grandfather used to say the mountains protected us from the snow, but he would also jokingly say they protected us from a lot of other things as well, so I really didn’t think much into it.

Huntington and Columbus are barely over 100 miles apart. On paper, that shouldn’t be enough distance to create two completely different winter personalities. But when you look closer, geography starts telling a different story.

Columbus sits farther north, fully exposed on relatively flat terrain. There’s nothing really breaking the wind when Arctic air pushes down from Canada. When cold settles in, it settles in clean.

Huntington, on the other hand, sits along the edge of the Appalachian foothills. We’re tucked into hills, valleys, and the Ohio River basin. It’s not dramatic mountain shielding, but it’s enough to slightly disrupt air patterns and snow bands. We often get cold rain while Columbus gets accumulating snow. We get slush while they get powder.

And then there’s Lake Erie.

Columbus is far enough north to occasionally catch spillover lake-effect moisture. Huntington is not. That single geographic difference can mean several inches of snow that we never see.

When you look at the averages, the pattern becomes clearer:

Columbus runs a few degrees colder in January. It gets nearly double the annual snowfall. Snow cover sticks around longer. The cold feels sustained.

Huntington feels different. Slightly warmer. More mixed precipitation. Faster melt. More gray rain days instead of white snow days.

It’s not dramatic — but it’s consistent.

What fascinates me isn’t just the data. It’s how small geographic shifts create noticeably different lived experiences. One hundred miles. A lake. Some hills. A slight difference in latitude. And suddenly winter has a different personality.

It reminds me how much environment shapes perception.

Sometimes what feels like imagination is actually structure.

Sometimes what feels like “it’s always colder there” turns out to be quietly, statistically true.

And sometimes the hills you live among are doing more for you than you realize.