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When I was growing up outside of Greeley and going on Sunday drives with my parents, I was bitterly disappointed at three destinations.
To my childhood dismay, Estes Park wasn't a big park with ferris wheels and roller coasters, but just some town up in the mountains. Pueblo was a series of smokestacks instead of an enchanting adobe fortress. Fraser, famous as President Eisenhower's vacation hideaway, presented little more than a sawmill and a few ramshackle buildings; I had expected much more from such a well-known place.
It wasn't just the presidential presence that made me
expect so much. Fraser was then the undisputed Icebox of
the Nation.
There were competitors like Big Piney,
Wyo., but most mornings, the radio weather would conclude
with the announcement that Fraser, Colorado, again had
the coldest temperature in the nation at eight degrees
below zero.
And that would be in May. Fraser's average annual frost-free growing season is four days long, so even its summers are chilly. Its annual mean temperature is 33.8°, just above freezing. I never realized just how cold Fraser is until I spent four winters in another Grand County town, Kremmling.
Winters in Kremmling seemed sufficiently brutal -- long
nights dipping to 30 below, and the high on some January
days was all of 10 below. Even so, folks in Fraser
considered Kremmling the banana belt
of Middle Park,
because Fraser was always a few degrees colder.
When pressed, though, old-timers would concede that Fraser wasn't truly the coldest spot around. That was Tabernash, four miles down the river, where gelid air settled at the inlet of a canyon. A helper station in the days of steam locomotives, Tabernash was where huge articulated mallets froze to the tracks. Local lore had it that Tabernash was always at least five degrees below Fraser.
But Fraser, not Tabernash, had the official weather station and thus the fame. Fraser was proud of its frigid reputation, which brought some money into town as Goodyear and Xerex, among others, filmed commercials there.
It was sometime in the early 1970s that various metropolitan promoters decided that Fraser was giving Colorado a bad name. On an April day, Denver might be enjoying T-shirt weather, but all that the rest of the world knew about Colorado was the subzero reading in Fraser. Such reports might discourage outsiders from moving here and augmenting Front Range congestion and pollution, and that would never do.
In the interest of encouraging Front Range development,
Fraser's temperatures were censored. Then Fraser lost its
official weather station. Other towns began to boast of
being the Icebox of the Nation.
One was International Falls, Minn. Besides low temperatures, Minnesota also offers high humidity and vicious winds, two contributions to human misery not often found in our mountain towns. For all-round boreal brutality, International Falls has to be a contender, although there are people who swear that there is no worse place to spend a winter than Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
However, we're talking only cold here, and day in and day out, Fraser's temperature is lower. Even boastful International Falls conceded when Fraser issued a challenge last December.
Just this week, it was announced that Gunnison deserves that distinction, since it most often had the lowest low in the United States.
Gunnson is indeed cold. Allen Best, a friend who then
lived in Fraser, went cross-country skiing with me in the
Gunnison Country two years ago. He acquired five blackened,
peeling toes on our tour, and suggested a slogan:
Gunnison -- where people from Fraser go to catch
frostbite.
Fraser hasn't given up, though. The Icebox of the
Nation
sign was still there when I passed through last
December, although much else has changed. The hillsides are
full of housing, and there's a big new shopping center.
It's the only mountain town I've seen lately where more
businesses are opening than closing.
Fraser's mayor, C.B. Jensen, is himself a real-estate developer and builder. You might think that he'd be against promoting Fraser's gelid climate; such publicity could hurt his business. But instead, he's excited. Fraser just got its official weather station back, and he figures on beating Gunnison next year.
The more publicity about Fraser's cold weather, the more
the town appears to prosper. Perhaps there is something to
the saying that Honesty is the best policy.
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