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Salida wasn't exactly basking in sunshine while most of Colorado got hammered by the three-day blizzard last week, but we didn't get hit as hard as many other places. Westcliffe, for instance, got about five feet, and surrounding Custer County was pretty well closed off and shut down. Quite a bit of snow fell here, although it's hard to know how much.
For one thing, the preceding days had been balmy, so the ground and pavement held considerable retained heat, and thus much of the snow melted the instant it reached bottom.
Then there's the compression factor. Suppose it snows at the rate of one inch per hour for 12 hours. But if you stick a yardstick in it, you won't find a foot, but more like eight inches. Which is accurate?
There may be regulations about the proper measurement method for snow, but if so, I haven't encountered them. Back in the dry winter of 1980-81, we were returning to Salida from the metro area. In those days, I-70 was often passable in the winter, and so we took it and stopped in Breckenridge to visit friends.
They had just built a new house on the hillside with a splendid view of the slopes -- where there was so little snow that the tops of the sagebrush were visible.
I had just heard on the radio that Breckenridge had a 42 inches of packed powder, which should have covered the sagebrush and then some. I inquired as to how the sagebrush could still be showing.
It's easy,
my host said. They lie.
But
even when there's no incentive to exaggerate, it's still
difficult to determine just how much fell. In early May of
2001, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico migrated northwest,
sidled along the Sangre de Cristo Range, then stalled
against the Sawatch Range, right over Salida, where it met
arctic air moving south. The collision produced three days
of heavy snowfall here.
It was a lot of snow, but how much? The most I measured,
outside of drifts, was about 30 inches in an alley. The
official
snowfall was 60 inches. I inquired about
methodology with the people who produced that
measurement.
They said they had checked their measurements every couple of hours, and added the differences. For instance, if there was 12 inches of snow at 1 p.m., and 15 inches at 4 p.m., then they added 3 inches to the total. And their final total, the sum of those differences, came to 60 inches -- even though compression, ground-melting, sublimation and other factors made the actual snow depth only half that number.
Storms like that can be terrifying, even when you've made the preparations (stocking food, firewood, lanterns, cribbage board, etc.) and then take the sensible advice of the authorities and stay home.
Inside the house, it's pleasant at first. Throw more logs on the fire, catch up on your reading, and look out the window from time to time and wonder what kind of idiot would be trying to drive in this weather. Then you notice it's a utility truck, checking the electric lines, and figure you've just seen some real heros.
Then you notice that there's more than a foot of that dense wet spring snow out there, and recall that part of the house has a flat roof. The calculations start. The local building code calls for a roof that can handle a snow load of 50 pounds per square foot, although you have no idea whether the guy who built your roof a century ago even thought about such matters.
A foot of normal Colorado powder has about an inch of water content. So triple that, both for this sloppy stuff and to be on the safe side, and calculate the load when there's a foot of snow. Three inches of water on a square foot, that works out to a quarter of a cubic foot of water. A cubic foot of water weighs about 62 pounds, so snow with three inches of water content should make a load of about 15 pounds, well below the design limit.
Thus comforted for the first foot, you watch the snow continue to fall and your comfort level drops, no matter how much you employ cribbage as a distraction. You wonder about how much longer it will be safe to be under your roof, but when you look outside, immense tree branches are snapping and falling, and there's always the chance one will bring a live power line down with it when you happen to be there. You stay indoors.
The power is still on, and the little satellite dish is still working, even though heavy snow often blocks the signals. The TV news shows that the metro area is getting a serious dump. Then a view of Baghdad, where the sky is so clear you can see the flak as the first bombs fall.
You start to wish the blizzard would continue, even with your roof worries, so that you could stay isolated from the rest of the world for a little longer.
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