Paul E. Anna: High Points

Do we have the world’s best weather?

After a week that saw rain, mud, lightning and flight cancellations that may be, in your opinion, a silly question to pose. But while I was sitting around yesterday on a gorgeous Thursday early morning, watching the sun dry the evening dew off of the oh-so green plants and shrubs that are thriving around my house, it seemed to me to be a perfectly appropriate question to ponder.

If you consider that the average temperature for Aspen on July 14 is 79 degrees, and then look at the extreme temps that have heated up cities around the nation, I think you’ll agree that we are in a sweet spot. To say the least.

Much of the country has been sweltering lately under temperatures that have exceeded 100 degrees and humidity that has been in 90 percent range. It’s enough to curl a bald man’s hair. In Texas there have been multiple stretches of 100-degree days and in Washington the debt debate has taken a back seat to conversations about the humidity. This week my mother will be fleeing Scottsdale, Ariz., where the thermometer has hit 118 earlier this month. Kind of makes our little afternoon showers seem pretty tolerable by comparison.

In fact, it is the combination of summer sun and monsoon showers that have played together to make this such a beautiful summer thus far. I don’t remember a summer that was as green as this one has been. And the flowers have come in waves with some blooming early, and then being quickly replaced by a new crop of color as the first ones dispatch. This week in Old Snowmass it is the purple lupine mingling with the golden yellow arnica flowers that are particularly gorgeous. If you are a fan of LSU football, you no doubt have noticed that the colors match the Tigers colors.

Much of this, of course, is a result of the wet and snowy spring that we all endured all through May when storms moved in one after the other. At that point I was thinking perhaps we had the worst weather in the world as gray days were followed by more gray days. But when the calendar turned a page to June it seemed everything changed. Now we are in the middle of a summer season that is just warm enough to toast the skin and cool enough that even on a big ride up Four Corners or a hike on the Ute Trail you’re not oppressively hot.

I mean really, where you would rather be? If you suggest the tropics or the Caribbean, I say good riddance. If the thought is the Hawaiian Islands with it’s cooling, constant, trade winds, then I raise a Mai Tai to you and you’ll get no argument from me. I love Hawaii. But other than that, I suggest hunkering down in a Rocky Mountain town for the rest of the summer.

It may have the best weather in all the world.