Saddle Sore: Snow comes and goes

It was the autumn of 1976, and I was enjoying a gig on the Maryland horse farm known as Buckingham when the call of winter entered my psyche. Like a lemming to water, I felt that urgent pull toward the mountains. Driving my pickup with a horse rack on the back, I made a short stop in Nashville to visit Buck Deane, and before you know it, I was leaving Denver with about six inches of fresh, wet snow on the ground. Gotta go, gotta go — thank you for the hospitality.

My first stop in Aspen was the Red Onion, looking for Bud Law — “Bear” to most, head of the Aspen Mountain Ski Patrol — to find out if we were going to start pre-season work the next morning. Bud laughed, “Welcome back, but there isn’t enough snow to get excited about skiing. We’re on hold until we get more snow.” We finally went to work in January.

Yeah, it’s been a little dry this November, but as someone said on social media: It comes and goes. I have a photo of my granddad, my dad, and his sister on top of Independence Pass on March 1, 1935. They’d driven up there in a two-wheel-drive car, the ultimate in warm, winter comfort.

Seven years after that above-mentioned thin winter of 1976, it started snowing in November, and through December, 1983, we got so much early snow that ski lifts occasionally opened late because the patrol hadn’t yet finished avalanche control. Retired patrollers and guys from other departments were called in, some working overnight to keep up with the never-ending snowfall. As district manager for BFI, the local solid-waste company, I’d go to work at 4:30 a.m. to coordinate with Puppy Smith, the city’s streets manager, to see which streets and alleys he was clearing, so our trucks could get around.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2010, when we got some heavy early snows. Bob Snyder and I, by virtue of our Aspen Ski Club memberships, got on the mountain a couple of days early. Hardly anyone around, we skied Summit four or five times and then, on a hunch, headed to the Face of Bell. Barely tracked up, in about two feet of fairly light snow, we had a blast and caught it all on a digital camera. Didn’t find any snow snakes or rocks, either.

There are other extremes I could go on about, like late August of 1986 or ’87, when it hadn’t rained in weeks and the high-country grass was wilting and turning brown. I figured we’d have to bring our cattle down early off summer range, but about a week later it started raining — almost a deluge.

Or, much later, around 2015, when I was harrowing fields on the Woody Creek ranch. The snow had melted early, the creek was running very low, and the grass in early May was already turning brown. There wasn’t going to be much runoff; it looked dismal for the hay crop and summer cattle pasture. But then late May rolled in with steady rain. It rained so much our hay crops were excellent — except it was hard to get them put up because of the almost incessant moisture. Every time my horses and I went into the mountains, which was often, we got seriously rained on.

Speaking of deluges, we’ve been getting a lot of press these past few years about “climate change” and other weather anomalies. Climate models going in all directions. Dire predictions, including the end of civilization as we know it. But lately, it seems as though cooler heads are speaking up.

After enough years in this valley, you learn not to panic over any one season. I’ve seen winters so thin you could drive to the top of Independence Pass and others so deep the patrol couldn’t tame the mountain before noon. I’ve watched grass burn brown in August and then turn emerald again after a week of steady rain. My dad saw the same. So did my granddad.

The weather has never shown us the same face twice, and it isn’t about to start now. Folks can argue, predict, run more models, and sound alarms if they want, but the mountains play the long game. Around here, the only real constant is that it comes and it goes — and it’ll keep on doing just that, long after we’re done talking about it.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.