Single-digit cold returned this week to Denver, which is now into its seventh week of continuous snow cover. For a good many people here, that’s six weeks too long.
“Enough already!” proclaimed a Denver newspaper after another storm. Anguished television broadcasters said “yuck” in 10 different ways. My neighbors said as much with their non-actions: Many never bothered to shovel their walks. If Colorado resembled Southern California, that would be just fine with many people. Increasingly during recent years, it has – both in its temperate climate and rhizomic, tangled urbanism.
This winter has been challenging. Since the big smack of snow before Christmas, neighborhood streets have been studded with monster snow piles, viciously rutted and pocked with hubcap-flinging holes. For perhaps the first time in our current prosperity, an SUV in every garage may be justified.
Denver’s identity is linked closely to the Rocky Mountains, but it’s really just at the front doorstep. “Queen City of the Plains” it once was called, but that was before the mountains became a fashionable address. However, people here have little stomach for snow. A white Christmas is nice, but then preferably discarded along with the tinsel-draped tree.
People in true mountain towns, where I long lived, relish the snow. Snow freshens the landscape, a periodic fresh wedding dress, and rounds the hard edges of the geography, like a floor smothered in pillows. It creates a magical world for those on skis and snowshoes.
Ski towns become giddy in a snowstorm. Sixteen inches of fresh, powdery snow is cause for an impromptu community celebration that no formal holiday, neither Christmas nor the Fourth of July, remotely rivals. “Closed” signs are posted, appointments canceled, friendships neglected. All such narcissism is forgiven by those who have even once floated down a mountainside, bouncing softly atop the airy flakes.
A small town hemmed in by mountains is a marvel of industry after a storm. Unlike Denver, mountain towns rarely shut down. Melting may not come for months. Snow shoveling and plowing must be done quickly, and routinely.
But this toil, in time, also produces grouchiness. Shoveling can add hours to the workday. At some point the magical mounds feel like prison bars. Room to store snow disappears. Then, maybe your neighbor’s shoveled snow falls into the sidewalk you just cleared. These Currier & Ives towns then become cauldrons of snippy, seething testiness.
Such weariness is already evident in Denver. Winter has become as stale as Britney Spears’ marriage. It hasn’t been a truly hard winter. But this place has become accustomed to 11-month golf seasons and ice skating as an indoor sport.
Winter, too, holds less bite in mountain towns, and then rushes out the door. In Red Cliff, a tiny town located at 8,600 feet, old-timers a generation ago always said that snow piles reached their peak bulk on St. Patrick’s Day. Now, it’s late February. Similarly, rivers in California’s Sierra Nevada have been peaking three weeks earlier.
The National Arbor Day Foundation, after examining data from 5,000 weather stations across the nation from 1990 to 2005, revised its hardiness zones for trees. Large swathes of the country have been having average winter lows 10 degrees less cold.
Clearly, our climate is changing. A more confident view of the future was evident on Thursday when the International Panel on Climate Change, representing the consensus opinions of more than 1,200 scientists spread across the globe, issued its 2007 summary report, the fourth since 1990.
So maybe it’s pure nostalgia, but I have enjoyed every squeaky, crunching step in Denver’s arctic chill this winter, every frosty, downy flake. True winter, sadly, is becoming the odd duck.
Allen Best publishes Mountain Town News, a newsletter that tracks trends in resort valleys of the North American West.
