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People in the West must be optimistic. Even though this
is an El Nino year, and even though many winter days remain
in 1997, the Oct. 24 storm has been christened THE
Blizzard of 1997
-- evidence of faith that no other
storm will arrive this year to contend for the honor.
More instructive was the response to the blizzard. Where it struck, it was awful: about a dozen people died, thousands of cattle were killed, highways were closed for days with attendant travails for travelers, etc.
But that was out on the Great Plains. Up here in the mountains, Alamosa received an inch or two. Leadville got a little more. Between them in Salida, we got perhaps a foot.
Matters may have been worse in South Park, which in this regard functions as a southern extension of Wyoming. That is, it doesn't get much snow, but the wind is of such exquisite consistency and velocity that the snow stays in suspension all winter. These ground blizzards make accurate measurements impossible -- the snow just won't stay still long enough for our instruments.
In the mountains, this was merely the annual fall storm: a few inches of snow to warn that fall and Indian Summer were over.
However, Colorado mythology made many good people worry
more than necessary. As the storm raged, I got calls and
emails from friends and relatives along the Front Range,
all to the effect of It's terrible down here. Nothing's
moving and you can't see across the street. How are you
guys handling it, since it must be a lot worse up
there?
It wasn't worse up here, and in truth, it seldom is. Mythology has it that the Rockies are a harsh habitat, but the mountains are really a much easier place to live.
One piece of evidence: the Colorado school district which holds the record for never closing for snow -- more than a century of uninterrupted service -- is Leadville, which is about as mountain as a town can get. It's the prairie schools which always lose educational days, or weeks, to blizzards.
The Great Plains offer dozens of ways to kill you, ways that are rare or nonexistent in the mountains.
Mountain water is potable and relatively abundant; you can go for days on the Plains without seeing any water, and when you do, it's likely a toxic alkali seep.
Lightning can strike in the high country -- but it's more likely to strike when you're the highest object for miles around, an easy accomplishment on the prairie, especially on horseback.
Hailstorms hammer harder when there are no trees or abandoned mines for shelter. Plains summers are hotter and their winters, if one takes into account the wind-chill factor, are colder.
The Great American Desert is about as tough a place as
this continent offers, as recognized by the historian
Walter Prescott Webb in his landmark book, The Great
Plains.
The short-grass prairie, he observed, was quite different from any place that humans had ever tried to live before. Indians needed something new -- the Spanish horse -- before they could occupy the plains. Whites had to invent the six-shooter, the windmill, and barbed wire before they had any hope of settling the steppes.
For further proof that the mountains are an easy place
to live, I talked to my older daughter, Columbine. (People
think she's named for our state flower, but it's actually
an old Indian term that means my parents were
hippies.
)
She was born in gelid Kremmling, spent a winter in Iceland as an exchange student, and survived three hard winters in Gunnison at Western State College. In other words, she knows cold. So she escaped it this winter by arranging two semesters at the University of Puerto Rico.
It's always warm in San Juan, she conceded, but I
don't know how anybody lives here. The hurricanes are bad
enough, but at least they're seasonal. We have herds of
cockroaches all the time, and they're impossible to kill --
I put some in the microwave for four minutes at the high
setting, and they just walked out afterward. You can swim
every day, but have you ever been stung by a
jellyfish?
She concluded that it was much easier to live in Gunnison, where 20-below in February is considered balmy, than in the steamy Caribbean.
And so, whenever the forecasters issue the statewide alerts and warnings, I prepare for the concerned calls from the Front Range, and for my part, I worry about the folks in Limon, Julesberg, and Lamar.
But I generally keep these worries private, and remind myself that I should promote the myth that the mountains are brutal. The more that people believe this myth, the less immigration, and an easy life can stay that way.
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