Wed, Jan 17, 2007
Unkind and Exhausting Weather
Posted to Miscellaneous category
Highway 93, between Boulder and Golden was closed for most of the day because of very strong winds and blowing snow. The sky was blue and the sun was shining, but there is plenty of snow on the ground for the wind to push around. Highway 93 is just a few miles to the west of me, up against the foot of the mountains.
Here on the mesa, we got wind and blowing snow, too. I had a form to fax, so I took an early lunch and shoveled the accumulating drift out of the path to the end of the driveway. When I got back from the UPS Store and Wild Oats Supermarket less than an hour later, the snow in the path was more than twice as deep as what I had shoveled on the way out.
I don't think the drifts will get as deep as they did a week and a half ago (a noticeable amount of the snow has melted away since then, so there is less to pile up) but I'm going to have another round of shoveling to do once the wind dies down.
At least the new satellite setup doesn't glitch in the wind the way the old one did.
I first moved to Boulder in the summer of '81, and I bought this house in '85, and I don't remember a winter being this continuously obnoxious. I spent the winter before last in Boston (just in time for the worst blizzard since the big one in '78 and the worst spring nor'easter they'd had in years) and the winter before that I was in Minnetoka, which was actually quite pleasant, though cold, so I was mostly away for those two winters. But both of those were dry winters here in Colorado.
This year we have had snow and snow and wind and windy snow and snowy wind. Any one week of the weather we've had in the past 5 weeks would not have been out of place in a normal year. What's weird is that it has been so continuous and we haven't had enough of a thaw to take the snow off most places around here.
There are two times we can count on nasty weather for the Denver area. One is the Broncos playing Monday Night Football. The other is during the National Western Stock Show, which runs for a few weeks in late January. It's running now, so I don't really expect nice weather any time soon. I just hope we get the usual post-stock-show thaw. But since we missed the normal pre-stock-show thaw I'm not optimistic.