Maybe the third time is a charm.
We need the moisture, but I’m sick of these two and half hour drives to work. :mad:
How are you guys doing?
Went out early for a chiropractor appointment. No sign of plows. Turns out that 50 of the 80 plows Colorado Springs owns are in the shop for repairs after chipping blades on curbs or burning out bearings in the last storm. The city pick-ups are dumping sand here and there, but that’s about all that’s being done. Not even the main arteries, like Academy Blvd. , are being plowed. So, the six or seven inches we’ve received so far wouldn’t ordinarily be such a big problem as they are today. The FREX buses aren’t running up to Denver because there are chain requirements on I-25 and, apparently, there are no chains available for the FREX buses. Good thing we can work from home today.
We moved back in 2000, so we’ve seen mostly drought winters. I had completely forgotten what a real Colorado winter looks like. This one is reminding me of my high school/early driving years. Too bad these big dumps of snow are missing the ski areas and other high country areas where people actually like the stuff.
We are having some good sledding, though.
Careful on the ice everybody! I hit my head on the driveway when I fell on the way to the mailbox in the last storm. Get your Yaktrax out and use 'em.
Tabby
Didn’t bother with the truck today, I hope I don’t regret driving the Corolla.
Looks like we’ll be sledding again this weekend.
Wow! Good luck in the Springs. (I went to high school there. The one with its own traffic hazard. :rolleyes: ) If they can’t get Academy clear, things must be bad!
I got Yaktrax for Yule. Maybe I’ll ask for good water proof boots for my birthday. (Hitting the Big Three-Oh a month from today. :eek: )
So Mouse Maven, I’m assuming you’re somewhere in RTD land? Maybe Greality or Longmont? Think mass transit! Driving to work anywhere on the Front Range is a pain in the glutes in any weather!
We got a few inches of wet snow out here on the plains – my commute is normally six minutes (I live on a county road a couple of miles outside of town) but today it stretched into an agonizing 11 minutes! 
Suck it up, fellow Centennial Staters! If you’re not looking for cattle in Baca County, you got nothin’ to complain about! This is Colorado! It’s January! What part of that do you not understand?!
And if you weren’t born and raised here, you know you moved here BECAUSE of the snow, right? Well, what did you think, it only fell on selected ski slopes!? This is what winter is SUPPOSED to be like in Colorado!
Gawd I miss the precipitation of the late 80’s and early 90’s! The money I made at the service station over winter (too bad I drank it all)
Still, getting a storm per week is a little unusual in Denver-metro, this being an historically dry location. Off to NOAA go I!
Wouldn’t mind if it got spread out a little more - say every two weeks maybe, just so the trash pick-up guys could make it by the house.
I typically take the bus, anything for extra sleep . Today, my crank old cat has a vet appointment, so I was going to leave early. Come to think of it, I better call the vet and see if they’re open.
Yep, my wife and I both used RTD when we lived in Longmont – I worked in downtown Longmont (Times-Call) and she worked in Boulder. It’s great if it’s a routine day – I hated non-routine days! If the commuter gods were with us, we’d go a whole week without taking the car out of the garage.
BTW, I just read my last post and thought, “Omigod! I’m my old man!” Sorry I sounded so geezer-y!
Lot of fun at NOAA (especially if you’re trying to avoid work). Highs, lows, precip, etc. for the past 134 years in Denver/Boulder.
Hottest temp in Denver history was 105 degree F on July 20, 2005, which only tied the record set August 8, 1878. Coldest was 29 below zero January 9, 1875.
Snowiest year: 118.7 inches 1908-09
Least snowiest: 20.8 inches 1888-89
The Top 12 Denver Snowstorms since 1946:
31.8 inches Mar 18, 2003
30.4 inches Nov 3, 1946
23.8 inches Dec 24, 1982
21.9 inches Oct 25, 1997
21.5 inches Nov 27, 1983
21.2 inches Nov 19, 1991
18.7 inches Mar 5, 1983
17.7 inches Nov 19, 1979
17.3 inches Apr 1, 1957
16.9 inches Mar 20, 1952
16.0 inches Oct 3, 1969
15.8 inches Apr 26, 1972
(all numbers courtesy NOAA at above referenced link)
December 2006 isn’t on that list yet, it’d fall in at #4, probably.
Last night’s 2-4" forcast is sitting 9" deep in my driveway and it is still snowing. Boulder Valley schools are closed for the first time in many years.
More snow and a DEEP freeze expected at the end of next week. Fun times.
Don’t sweat it. I’ve been having the “OMG! I’m turning 30 in a month!” panic today, so everything I say or think sounds geezer-y.
That’s a nifty one. My high school’s arch-hockey-nemesis. I was a maroon bus kind of a gal, myself. About, um, six years ahead of your time. Happy birthday!
Tabby
Long-term forecast predicts snow next Thurs/Fri! 
Small world! Thanks
:eek: Did some ski bum sell his soul to the snow gods for a bunch of three day weekends?
11,200 feet. About 100 miles west of Denver on my front deck.
Thats Mt Bross on the left and Lincoln on the right. Yep, that’s the moon. Both are 14ners. It ain’t all bad.
One
It is really nasty out there. It doesn’t seem bad in the neighborhoods or around town, but if you get on a N-S road in an exposed area, it really sucks. I just drove Hwy 287 between Longmont and Lafayette and it is drifted over in places up to a foot or more deep. Cars are all over the place.
Just saw a news flash about an avalanche in the mountains that took out Highway 40 and a bunch of cars.
I pray that everyone is alright. Good gods! 
Amazing. For a lot of Coloradans, not to mention those from Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, this series was nothing short of historic… and it ain’t over yet.
We first came up to S.E CO (Arkansas River Valley) right before Christmas when the roads were just passable from the first blast. There was a foot and a half of snow on the in-laws yard, more than enough to make a big snowman, snowwife and snowkidder. The six year old was lovin’ it. We tracked and called in some coyotes out at the ranch (just called, not hunted) and dragged a sled behind the pick-up with a throwin’ rope. At that time there was enough snow to be fun, winterlandy, not dangerous.
We then hauled off to the mountains just ahead of the next blast, navigating through Hoosier Pass as visibility and roads became treacherous. For the next four days though, it was perfect in the mountains. Good powder and clear skies. We were surprised then to hear from the in-laws that they’d had 36 more inches in the plains, the brother in-laws in Lamar actually had four feet. It was a NE-SW treanding band, and those in the middle got hammered for two days solid.
We hurried back to help, me with a dislocated shoulder after getting Volkl frisky on Peak 10, and spent the next couple of days battling the worst plains snowfall we’d ever seen. We shoveled several feet off the house since there were collapsed structures all over town. What few roads were cleared were only one lane wide and snowpiles downtown were 8 to 10 feet high. Almost everything was closed. We hooked blades up to the tractors and tried to bust trails out to at least some part of the nearest nine cattle pastures for around 4,500 to 5,000 head. We had to take shovels and dig out the drifts under a couple of RR trestles and Hwy 50 so we could move some head from the summer pasture down to the winter grounds. You just can’t imagine the depth and how difficult it was to get anywhere, especially when what you’d clear would quickly be drifted over by the relentless wind. Our little Bobcat skidder was comically overwhelmed in the pastures. Tractors and bigger Deere and Cats only.
Neighbors worked with neighbors. We took a skid loader and cleared out driveways for most of the in-law’s neighbors. Rancher talked to rancher to help get farm to market roads cleared and hay to cattle and horses. The brother-in-law rented a D6 Caterpillar to get to and clear an area for his cattle, then had the National Guard helicopters assist with flying in feed. One mare aborted a foal and there’s a few head missing but he thinks they’ll now be okay. Our family ranch is now in about the same shape, some cattle missing, others whereabouts unknown, but hopefully most with access to feed now. Everything at our feed lot did fine and I guess we’ll know about the back stretches of the ranch in a week or two. 98% we still can’t get to.
Getting back home to Texas wasn’t easy either. 287 was completely closed, 50 too for a long time, and we skidded across snowpack and ice east all the way to Garden City, Kansas before we could turn south. Finally, after passing through a big ice belt down to Liberal, we broke through and had passable roads.
When you experience a big rainstorm, it’s there and gone and maybe the flooding will give you an appreciation for the volume. With this storm though, the volume was there preserved for our viewing for days on end. You’d drive and drive and would see fields covered to above fencelines, stuck cattle, flipped massive road clearing equipment… and it went on seemingly forever. The sheer volume of moisture was almost incomprehensible.
Good luck to everyone still up there. This was one for the books, one they’ll be tellin’ their grandkids about someday.
Sorry, I was skiing and missed this thread. Wednesday and Thursday kind of sucked. Friday rocked.