GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Bruce Robinson was looking more like a rancher
than a banker on Friday as he sat in his Ford tractor and pushed snow
out of the driveway of his Canyon Creek home — again.
His wife Dayle was in their hay barn, trying
to salvage bales for their horses from beneath a roof that had
collapsed under the weight of three feet of snow.
“It reminds me of the old days when we used
to get a lot of snow,” Dayle said, after trying to uncover her horse
trailer from the snow.
In a battery of storms that has hammered the
Roaring Fork Valley, the Robinsons have watched storm after storm
barrel out of the Flat Tops through the canyon above their home and
cover Canyon Creek, west of Glenwood, with snow.
“I literally have not stopped plowing,” said Robinson, regional president for Alpine Bank. “It’s been a daily event.”
Aspen isn’t alone this winter in enjoying a
snowfall to remember. Downvalley communities have also been hammered.
Often, storms have dropped more powder in Glenwood than in Aspen.
“It’s been a hell of a winter,” said Glenwood
Springs resident Ed Troyer. “Especially here in the snow hole. That’s
what they told us it was called when we moved here, and it’s proving
that way this winter.”
And it may not be letting up. While earlier
forecasts had called for a dry February to follow a snowy January, it’s
not shaping up that way. After a couple of clear days, the snow is
expected to return this week, according to the National Weather
Service.
“I’m seeing another trend of storms starting
to show up again,” said Aldis Strautins, meteorologist for the National
Weather Service in Grand Junction. “Maybe we’re not out of the track
yet.”
At times Glenwood’s streets have been piled so
high with snow they looked like bobsled tracks. Glenwood schools have
had three snow days — more than Superintendent Judy Haptonstall
remembers ever having. Colorado Mountain College has had to cancel
classes, even at the Rifle campus, where snow days aren’t exactly
common.
Snow has shut down Interstate 70 near
Glenwood. It closed McClure Pass above Redstone last week. City crews
have scratched their heads wondering what to do with all the snow they
shovel off the roads. In Carbondale, they’re trading dumping snow on
school property in exchange for helping shovel the school grounds.
Wildlife officials worry the snows may begin taking a toll on deer and elk.
Sunlight
On Thursday night, flakes swirled past the headlamps of hikers as they
trudged up Sunlight Mountain Resort on a moonless night to train for
the upcoming 24 Hours of Sunlight competition. Some seven inches of
snow fell that night, and 11 inches over the previous two days, more
than any of the Aspen mountains got.
If the snow keeps up, said Sunlight CEO Tom Jankovsky, a record snow year may be in the works.
“It’s just been powder all week,” Jankovsky said. “It’s been fabulous. I’ve been skiing places I’ve never skied before.”
Sunlight has a 63-inch base mid-mountain. It
cracked 100 inches in 1982, Jankovsky said, and if the snow keeps up,
that’s not out of the question.
Western Colorado has been graced with a
succession of storms over the winter. Usually, Strautins said, they’ve
brewed over the Pacific off the coast of Northern California or
Washington and brought a series of storms that followed the same paths.
“Sometimes once you get on the track it
continues, and this one has been a good long storm track that has been
over top of us that way,” he said.
When the winds blow the right way, storms can
drop more on Glenwood than on Aspen or the higher elevations, Strautins
said. A few times that has meant more snow in Glenwood than on
Sunlight, just above town. Some spots in New Castle have gotten more
than Glenwood. And Canyon Creek, where the Robinsons live, has been
hammered.
It was Super Bowl Sunday when the Robinsons
discovered their hay barn had crumbled. It wasn’t just the roof. The
poles that held it up bent under the weight. They collapsed even
farther a few days later.
“I can remember years ago in the early ‘80s
it seems like it really dumped, and I remember big piles of snow on
Grand Avenue,” Robinson said. “This is as close as I’ve seen to that.”
Wildlife
The snowfall has Division of Wildlife officials worried about the
impact on area deer and elk herds. They’ve been feeding herds in the
Gunnison Valley near Crested Butte. Conditions haven’t been that severe
here yet, but that could change, said DOW spokesman Randy Hampton.
DOW officials planned to fly over Western Colorado on Saturday to make sure the herds were surviving the winter.
“One of the things we’re dealing with is
perception,” Hampton said. “People have this perception that this is
just this horrendous winter, when in reality, this is just more of an
average winter. We just haven’t seen one for a long time. It’s been
eight years since we’ve seen this.”
In a typical winter, herds seek out lower
territory for winter range, Hampton said, but in snowier winters, they
take refuge in spots they reserve for more extreme conditions. Over
eight years, though, many of those areas have become subdivisions in
the Roaring Fork Valley, putting more pressure on the herds.
“In a lot of cases, they’ve built on that
critical winter range,” Hampton said. “It’s hard to tell people you
can’t build on that severe winter range when they haven’t seen any
animals there.”
DOW biologists have been flying over winter
ranges to make sure the snow isn’t taking too severe a toll on deer and
elk, Hampton said, and they’ve been testing the bone marrow of roadkill
to see how healthy the animals have been.
Winter deaths happen every year, he said.
Eighteen percent of yearlings can expect to not see the end of the
winter. When deer and elk are clustered closer to homes, those deaths
become more visible, even if they’re not any worse, Hampton said.
Very deep snows can threaten herds, though, he said, but so far, that hasn’t been the case.
“That said, we’re awful early,” Hampton said.
“We’ve got March and April to go, and March and April are huge snow
months. It’s a long winter.”
dfrey@aspendailynews.com