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