Clearly May can’t be trusted. We had a week of warm, sunny weather, enough to get us all back outside, riding bikes, getting our yards presentable, and enjoying spring, and then it snows. A lot.
The ground had thawed, so it isn’t sticking on the roads. It comes and goes in the yard, but has been as deep as six inches before melting back again. The ground has been fully covered all week. Where the snow slides off my roof, the piles are big enough the dogs are having a little trouble climbing over them when they go out in the morning.
This is springtime in the mountains, and anybody who’s been here for a while knows what to expect, though it always comes as a surprise anyway when you wake up and see winter has returned. That’s just the way it is.
I have friends with places in St. George, Florida and Arizona who escape all of this by going away for the month of May. I view that as a moral flaw, a weak constitution, and lack of commitment to their decision to live in Summit County. They embraced mountain life for better or for worse, but not for May. Chickens.
Then one day it will turn around, and summer will hit. A string of 80 degree days will turn the concern from snow to flooding. I guess it’s always something. Meanwhile, the spring work on the ranch is at a standstill. It’s never fully caught up, and this year it’s falling farther behind.
There’s some question whether this is the final storm of last winter or the initial storm of next winter. My uncle always said the dividing line was the Fourth of July, with snow in June being a late winter storm, and snow after the Fourth of July being an early start for next winter.
The reality is that it can and will snow here every month of the year. The ocean temperatures are showing a shift to a La Nina pattern, which the weather people seem to think means something. They don’t know what, but it seems important. There is a high probability that we will have weather here. What kind of weather is anybody’s guess, but it’s a safe bet there will be some.
The hornets’ nests I rely on for long-range weather forecasting got it right again this year. They built lots of smaller nests, high in the trees. The “high in the trees” part is supposed to indicate a heavy snow fall, and I’d say they got that right this winter.
Despite the slow start there was a lot of snow at higher elevations. Around 120% of normal in the Uintas. At my house, about 7,000 feet, it was a pretty light winter, with smaller storms and a lot less plowing than usual.
The hornets usually build gigantic nests, football-sized or larger, going into a hard winter. This year, there were nests everywhere, but small ones. Softball-sized for the most part. I don’t have the folklorist’s interpretation of that scattered approach means, but maybe it means it’s going to snow until June. Anyway, you have to give the hornets the win on this year’s predictions, once again being more accurate than all those scientists with their computer models predicting an average winter.
I turned 70 this week. It sounds terribly old. Younger family members have asked me if there is any great wisdom accumulated from all those years. There isn’t. Your joints squeak and grind sometimes, you have to get up several times in the night to go to the bathroom, and your hearing goes to pot.
I still managed to ski 75 days this winter, and would have skied more if December hadn’t been so dismal. I can’t hit the moguls like I used to, but can do laps in the Daly Chutes, hike Scott’s Bowl, and made it to the top of Jupiter Peak once this year. So it’s not all bad.
There are milestone birthdays. At 16 you get a driver’s license; 18 you can vote,;21 for drinking (legally). Then it all kind of stops, and the next real milestone is 65 when you get on Medicare and Social Security and qualify for a senior pass that knocks almost $1,000 off your ski pass. Life is good.
Then at 70, the doctor, who looks to be about 18, starts the appointment with, “For a guy your age,” and ends with comforting news like, “Don’t worry about it. Something else will kill you long before this does.” But the list of those looming “something elses” keeps growing.
Seventy isn’t old here. I ski with people who are 80 and still hitting it hard. But it’s hard to ignore it.
At times like this, I remember the sage advice my father gave me shortly before he died. He told us all, “Don’t put any beans up your nose.” That sums it up nicely.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.