By now I should know better, for I get fooled almost every year. I start to expect some pleasant time outdoors, and my hopes are dashed. This time around, it wasn’t the annual 2-foot snow dump that generally strikes on the first day that the local schools are out for spring break, but the incessant wind.
This has been the windiest winter I can remember. However, I’ve spent more exposed time this year than in previous winters. That’s because dogs are incapable of listening to reason, as in “Be still and lie by the fire with the cats.” Thus on most mornings, unless I can con Martha into the job, I’m out in the savage wind with our new dog Bodie for half an hour. He bounds with glee; I discover that no matter what direction I walk, I’m facing an arctic headwind that penetrates a down coat, a knit sweater and a flannel shirt.
The wind is not something you read about in the chamber-of-commerce brochures extolling the Colorado climate, although sometimes public officials are honest about it.
For instance, there’s an unsettled question as to what the “Poncha” in “Poncha Springs” means. Some point out that on certain old maps, it was “Poncho Springs,” and we all know what a poncho is.
Others say that “poncha” is a Spanish word for “gentle,” describing 9,016-foot Poncha Pass above the town and its namesake hot springs. However, Juan Bautista de Anza crossed it in 1779; he called it a “a very narrow canyon with almost unscalable walls,” which casts doubt on the “gentle” theory.
There were early accounts of tobacco, in a form known as “punche,” being traded in Taos, and the pass is one way to get there from the north, so the name might have come from that. Or it might not have.
One of my favorite troublemakers, Jeanne Englert of Lafayette, edited the Southern Ute Drum, the tribal newspaper, when she lived in Durango years ago. To settle the Poncha question for me, she contacted some Ute speakers who said it likely came from a Nuche locution for “foot-path,” which seems logical. But others say that doesn’t fit.
I once put the question to John Engelbrecht, who was then mayor of Poncha Springs. “Poncha? I always thought it was a Ute term for ‘place where the wind rips the flesh from your bones.”‘
One common theory has it that South Park gets only a foot of snow each year, but the constant wind holds those flakes in suspension all winter to form perpetual terrifying white-out ground blizzards. On one winter crossing, I stopped in Fairplay for gas and junk food and commented to the convenience-store clerk that this was a blessedly calm day without much wind.
She put her fingers to her lips, pointed to two kids at a video game, and said “You shouldn’t say that in front of children. If you must comment, call it the ‘w-word.”‘
So to be politically correct about South Park this winter, let us note that on at least two occasions, the w-word blew semi-trucks off the highway.
My only visit to Alamosa this winter, to ride the excursion train on Feb. 9, was a peach of a day, sunny and calm. So when I later chatted with a friend and colleague there, Marcia Darnell, I congratulated her on the easy winter.
“You hit the only nice day since Halloween,” she said. “The wind has been horrible. It never stops. Old-timers say they’re worried that the April winds started in January, and won’t quit until June.”
I tried to offer solace by pointing out that those gales and their loads of grit would surely elevate that area’s leading tourist attraction, the Great Sand Dunes.
But I wanted some hard data about this year’s wind. I called the National Weather Service office in Pueblo, which handles this part of the state. Certainly there would be wind data, current and historic, the meteorologist said. He referred me to a weather data website.
And there I discovered that I was expected to pay for information that was collected and collated at public expense. I know, the federal government is short on money these days. But if they can find more than a billion dollars a week for Iraq, shouldn’t there be a better way for mere American citizens to find out whether this really has been the windiest winter on record?
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
