Yes, History is not said to repeat but rhime… but this is extremely eary… We are being hit by a huge storm, blizzard, snow, wind… and I remember that same thing exactly 42 years ago. I was in Denver for a meeting on this day 42 years ago and the snow began early… it was determined to end the meeting early and I immeadiately headed home (In a short wheel base government pickup with little weight) to LaJunta. Heading south on I-25 it was snowing hard and the road was pretty miserable but I was making progress. Just after I crossed off the “Palmer Divide” at Monument the DOT was closing the gates on that road… so no more access up and back. I kept going south and when I hit the south side of Colorado Springs… the snow quit… with a strong north wind it was good sailing on to Pueblo… then I turned east… once I got a few miles east it was difficult to drive as the north wind was strong enough to almost blow me off the road at times then at times I would hit a patch where the farmers field on the north was heading for Mexico… and the visibility was near zero in that sand slug. Those slugs were not constant, so there were open spots that I could move ahead easilty then spots where you couldn’t see and prayed that the people behind had slowed down as well… It was late when I got into LaJunta… and of course a government vehicle had to be parked in the designated spot so I took it in and swapped to my personal vehicle and then back west to out house. Not a wonderful abode but what we could afford in the day… when I got there Sherrie, 8 months pregnant , was soaking towels and packing them in around the windows and doors to keep the dust down to a reasonable level… I grabbed up a few and we got most of the north side packed off.
Fortunately we still had power but the wind was getting worse and finally the small tower I had up came down onto my fence. Not a huge problem as I didn’t have anything on that tower but a wire antenna tie-off… We did have a police scanner going and listened to the reports. In Lajunta we didn’t get much snow, and what we got was brown from the dirt… on the Scanner we heard that part of the roof on the Pizza hut had been taken off… and they were estimating the wind from 60 to 90 mph. I am not sure but think we did loose power for awhile (maybe when the tower went down? but we had a camp stove and lantern and seem to remember we used them as heat and light. But I also remember we used them several times in the eastern plains. Maybe used them as much for that as we did for camping?
I don’t have any data to back that all up other than memory, but it was pretty bad and that damn wind/blizzard storm lasted nearly 24 hours… Such was life in Eastern Colorado back in 1977…
When this storm hit I did a little google search and found some references to that storm… I didn’t remember that there was a big death toll of 9 in eastern colorado and thousands of travelers stranded from Colorado to South Dakota… and they claimed a total of 15 died from that storm…
links:
https://www.krdo.com/news/local-news/snowstorm-history-remembered-in-southern-colorado/34813238
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/03/14/archives/15-dead-in-3-states-after-late-winter-blizzard.html
https://www.suntelegraph.com/story/2012/11/29/news/historically-written-the-blizzard-of-77/131.html
http://climate.colostate.edu/pdfs/Nolan-WinterClimateHighlights(Nov10).pdf
So, with all that history.. what did we do today… We went out for breakfast as a normal Wednesday morning thing for us… the roads were not horrible but the visibility was not great and likley will get much worse later in the day.
The fortunate thing so far has been that the temps are around 32 but dropping… I made the comment that heck when we first moved out here we went to parties in this kind of weather and I am sure we were skiing a couple of times on Wolfcreek when it was snowing so hard you barely could see the ground from the chairlift… but the skiing was great… the new snow was so deep that you could just about point it down hill and not go too fast… We were young and adventurous back then…
Out the front door and it has just started good….
Oh and yesterday… it was 60 and I was out walking, getting in a good 3 mile route in the neighborhood… Was about the same , although about 15 degrees cooler on the 10th when I got this picture… same waking route…
WD0AJG