Three snowstorms in three weeks, and another forecast for Thursday, and Colorado's Front Range is experiencing the makings of an epic winter. It was a lousy drive home to Boulder from the National Western Stock Show & Rodeo in Denver on Sunday evening, and I had to cancel a trip to Beaver Creek on Monday, because blowing and drifting snow and ground blizzards caused the Department of Transportation and State Police to close major highways and secondary routes all over the Front Range.
The storms also imperiled livestock and have hit ranchers on the Eastern Plains particuarly hard, so I don't mean to minimize some people's inconvenience and trivilize others' real misfortunes. However, for skiers, a winter like this is nature's greatest gift. Ski resorts up and down the Rockies have benefited from strong strong storms, and even if transportation to and from the high country was dicey at times, there have been more pluses than minuses so far.
While the Rockies are wallowing in snow, the Northeast is hurting and hurting badly. New England ski areas are limping along at best, and Europe is not any better off. The Alps are still in terrible shape. When I returned from Europe in early December, I wrote about the lack of snow, unseasonable warmth and sad prospects for the winter. These appear on my December 9, 2006, post. There has, alas, been no significant improvement. Whever there is a snow-poor year somewhere, resorts elsewhere might benefit in the short them, but in the long range, they suffer too.
In his guest column in the Denver Post, Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety reported, "One thing that has been common this season is that conditions for nearly every race -- other than Beaver Creek and Levi, Finland -- have been very inconsistent and unfair. There has been very little snow, and temperatures have been unseasonably warm. During the slalom here [Adelboden, Switzerland] on Sunday, it rained. On Monday, the temperature was about 45 degrees and the mountains slowly turned from snow to mud."
I'm not gloating, but I am grateful to be a skier and snowshoer living in a region where there is lots of snow -- at least, right now. I'm not taking anything for granted, snow-wise. It might not be like this next year (2005-06 were devastating in New Mexico and the winter before was uncharacterisitically snow-poor in the Pacific Northwest), so my winter soulmates and I better enjoy ski conditions while they are this good. And we fully expect even more Easterners, Europeans and Brits than unusual to come share our snowy slopes.
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I like to do informal chairlift surveys whenever I ski, asking people where they are from, and if they are visiting from the Northeast or the Midwest, where they ski at home or only on vacation. Except in a year like this, when snow in the Northeast was terrible, most people from New England or the Middle Atlantic States usually also ski in the Northeast, but many Midwesterners only go skiing when they come to the Rockies. Floridians have to go somewhere, and they overwhelmingly come West. There are a couple of OK ski areas in North Carolina, but thos folks usually travel to ski as well.
ReplyDeleteGlad you're getting so many privates!