Cheers to a great winter

After too many dry winters over the last couple of decades, the past snow season was great. While we never had a week-long “Snowmageddon” storm that dropped several feet at a time, the storms came through here every few days, gifting us with great powder for the skiers, and what should be a plentiful amount of water for the summer months. About 70% over the average amount is currently on the ground as I write this, and the photos were taken a couple days before Easter. Our beleaguered State Highway Department did a fantastic job of keeping the highway cleared, despite starting the season with zero plow operators for this district. A father and son duo were the foundation of the crew that made it happen, along with a few newer hires and some imported talent from other districts for the big storms. Grossly overworked, grossly underpaid and little appreciated for their efforts, (funny how those things go together,) the operators kept the traffic lanes open through it all. Up on the Pass a few miles away where the photos were taken, the snow was so plentiful that it became an impossible task to keep it off the traffic lanes, which were narrowed by at least a foot on either side. Wide areas of the shoulder that are pull-outs became giant seasonal depositories of snow. The few places available pull over and park were hard-fought achievements, earned through a lot of operator time and diesel fuel.

Here at home things melted out quite a bit faster, as the last month’s snow storms hit the road surface and melted. Muddy potholes are now the road maintenance priority for those of us at the lower elevations.

The official numbers are just shy of seven feet of snowpack on the local Pass, with about 30 inches of water content. A nearby but higher-elevation remote telemetry station shows 11 feet of snow with 50 inches of water content. That’s a nice high-altitude reservoir going into the summer. Now we’re hoping for a nice, cool spring so the abundant snowpack can slowly melt and soak into the very dry earth, and the remainder can off down to Lake Powell, where it is also sorely needed. While we’re not completely out of a 1,200-year drought, we sure made some headway against it!