It’s been a very strange winter. We’re better than halfway through it — 60 days left in the ski season — and winter’s having a hard time getting going.
I woke up early Wednesday morning to a strange silence. My house is in a pretty quiet location, but there is almost always a little white noise coming off the river.
Wednesday was silent. The river had frozen over. That doesn’t happen often. North of the highway, it tends to freeze over and in a low snow year, it can be really fun cross-country skiing on a little dusting on top of the ice. On the downstream side of the bridge, a warmer, spring-fed stream comes in, and it seldom ices up.
Wednesday’s -15 degrees did the trick. Dead silent. Even the dogs noticed something different.
Minus 15 is cold enough that my old farm hand would have put the ear flaps down on his Elmer Fudd hat. He was the toughest, orneriest, stubbornest and most dependable guy you would ever know. He could put a fence post into the ground by cussing alone.
He worked here for 50 years or better, and after he retired, he came up every morning and told me what I was doing wrong. I really miss him. I never saw him put the ear flaps down until it got to about minus 10 degrees.
Phil Jones, long-time manager of Park City Resort, was another of those people who would never wear a hat. He thought it would give customers the idea that it was too cold to go out to ski. I assumed his ears were made of some kind of plastic material. I never saw Stein Erickson in a hat, either.
Anyway, -15 is just plain cold. A week before, the high at my house was 54 degrees. In February. I was essentially down to bare ground when the fences should be buried. There was green grass in the pastures around Kamas.
Through the years, I’ve developed all kinds of protocols to maintain the permafrost layer in the dirt road to my house. It’s much easier for snow removal if the blower isn’t diving into the mud and choking on gravel. A solid ice base normally holds on until mid-March.
Not this year. It became a rutted-up mess last week, and now the ruts are frozen solid. I’m the only one on the road this year, the other permanent resident having retired and decamped to Arizona for the duration. So the ruts all steer into my garage. If there are others here, I have to be sure to land in the right set of ruts or end up like a train on the wrong track and land at somebody else’s house.
The forecast is for a major storm this weekend, so by the time you read this, we will either be joyously buried in the first really significant storm of the season or once again disappointed.
I don’t recall a winter where the forecasters have been as spectacularly wrong as this. Every little wiggle in the jet stream is pronounced an “atmospheric river” that is supposed to pack the snow in. They get all worked up with multiple feet predicted at a time.
I set the alarm for 5 so I have time to get the ranch dug out and still make something close to first chair. Then we get rain, or nothing at all, or maybe 3 or 4 inches of soggy snow, with wind that pushes whatever fell to Montana. So we’ll see. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then.
It’s been hard maintain my normal enthusiasm for the ski season. I’ve spent more time on polished groomers this year than in the decade before, even digging out an old pair of skis that I bought back in the last drought that are stiff enough to hold an edge on anything. There have been a couple of pretty good days in Empire Bowl when the moguls were spring-soft, but they have been carefully selected. Coverage in other areas has been sketchy. Daly Chutes? No thanks.
The usual ski group has dwindled in a pile of lame excuses. The start time rolls back a little later, the quit time comes a little earlier, and there are multiple coffee stops in the shortened day. Lots of no-shows.
The resorts have managed to do a good job with what they’ve had to work with. Deer Valley has been pretty good all season considering the circumstances. I haven’t been back to Park City Mountain more than a couple of times since the strike. I can’t find any enthusiasm for spending $35 for parking, or dealing with the Richardson Flat bus experience.
I need to get back to Jupiter, to Scotts, and hike the peak. But not in conditions like we’ve had.
So I’m hoping that this time, this atmospheric river, this storm will come through and reboot the season. Sixty days of good skiing, with fresh snow and enough cover to last us through spring — well it could still happen, and would be so welcome.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
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