When we lived in Colorado before we lived down south… even though we were in THE VALLEY (San Luis Valley) for some time we didn’t get what happened in the mountains. The valley was a very dry, flat but very high (7500 ft.) area so we didn’t get too many snow storms there in the spring. We also lived out on the Arkansas valley and we had some storms but nothing after April 1. It usually was rain by then if we got any. I do remember one spring storm that was in early to mid March? 1977. I was in Denver for some meetings and it started to snow pretty heavy so they ended the meeting early and I jumped into my “government” truck and headed south… I remember that the traffic was thinning as I came past Castle Rock and then as I came off the Monument Hill they were closing the interstate so it was a big storm. I was headed toward LaJunta for home and wasn’t going to stop but once I hit the Springs the snow stopped and it was clear sailing through Pueblo. But as I turned east along Hwy 50 and cleared out of any hills I ran into dust storms that made it near impossible to stay on the road or even see the road… I blundered on till I did get into LA Junta, parked that government truck got into my Ramcharger and got back home in time to help wet towels and put them around most of the doors and windows as the dust was horrible. It was about 4 weeks before Amy was born and we were having some fun… not. I had a 40 ft. tower up that only held my dipole in the air but the wind took that down. Whipped it hard enough to break the guy wires I had on the north side. I don’t remember much more about that storm other than we didn’t get but very little snow, enough to have brown crust on things, friends about 20 miles north got enough that the drift was to the eve of their house. Seems that the “blizzard” lasted about 12 hours or more, I know we had the high winds for at least that much. We survived and it is now only a small memory of things we lived through.
Here we are getting “snow showers” nearly ever week but still not what I would call a lot of moisture involved. Seems that every 3 days or so we get put back into a winter storm warning or something like that… way back when we didn’t know about winter storm warning, We would get a warning that this one is a big one so get ready but not as much warning as today. Locally, It was damn nice Sunday and Monday and I got a few things done outside then it fell apart again. from 70 to 40 pretty quick…Had a contractor come to look at some changes and additions to the deck at 4:30 pm and it was cool I had to grab a jacket but nothing in the air and he left by 5:30 as it was just starting to “drip” but then things fell apart. Tuesday it snow balled then snowed… My friends in Scotland would call the snow balls “hail”… here some call it ‘””grapple”, I think? not sure as that doesn’t fit other than it is not snow, not rain and not really hard hail as we know it… I prefer tiny snow balls…
and as for the snow showers…yep they look like this coming in..
but once it got started and had laid down about an inch of snow balls it went full tilt snow flakes that got as big as 50 cent pieces…
Hard to picture them but assume most of those splotches are about 10 ft. away… by the time it quit we had maybe 5 or 6 inches of the snow in top of what ever and then… the next day by noon it was pretty much all melted as it got back up to near 60 yesterday…
This is a totally different climate up here on the Palmer Divide. Just hoping that the summers are more like being a bit further west… nice and cool in the evening and decent (70’s) during the day… that seems to be a ways off with the current repeated snows and all?
Oh and got the notice of the old high school reunion “celebrating 50 years in the current school building” ouch… I remember the old building through about 8th grade?
WD0AJG