Four feet of spring at the Bar B
When a local “rogue” weather forecaster started talking about four feet of snow in the Conifer area, people didn’t believe him.
Heard tell he got in trouble for sharing NOAA graphics and retreated chastened into the web still holding onto his predictions.
Starting Friday, April 15 the snow started and most people thought the storm was a bust and posts heckling the weather forecasters popped up on social media.
Big storms always start small. By Saturday morning there was a respectable two feet of snow on the ground and I ventured out to work. U.S. 285 is a very busy highway and it’s a spooky thing to not see a single car from my house all the way to Doubleheader Ranch Road.
I turned around and went back home.
By the time nightfall came the snow was making some serious progress. By 10 p.m. the snow was approaching the top of the three-foot rail on the deck.
And it kept snowing …
and snowing.
I’m an optimist and felt sure that I could get my car out and go to work. By the time I got home the road’s would be plowed and my driveway groomed. I parked my car at the top of the driveway thinking that’d be a good idea. The only problem is that without the plow, that means I had to walk through four feet of snow to simply get to my car.
My car started up just fine and I’d carted a broom with me to clear off snow because God hasn’t invented a snow brush that can handle four feet. I made one miscalculation when I tried to drive; I miscalculated how smart it was to try and drive through heavy, wet snow without a four-wheel drive. My driveway was no place for an AWD vehicle.
I got stuck.
Christine started sliding as wheels fought for purchase on the driveway but the red clay of my mountainside is slick as snot when it gets wet. Christine slid off the right side of the driveway and came to rest next to a snowbank.
I called my plow guy and he said he’d be there soon and he could pull me out. I waited close to 2 hours. Seems his journey up Shadow Mountain was complicated by having to pull out stuck plow drivers he found along the way.
So, I’m sitting in my car and my new neighbor has a plow and he’s trying to clear his driveway only he’s never plowed anything before. You could smell the burning clutch. I watched him and I know he saw me. Good neighbor that he is, after about an hour-and-a-half of me sitting in my car, he came to check on me.
I finally made it to work around 1 p.m. and by then the roads were dry.
I still had much snow to contend with. If I needed anything from the shed, it’d just be better to go to Ace and buy it.
So, the big problems with that much snow is what to do with it all. Where do you store or stack it? I’m lucky I have my driveway edge and it can be pushed down there along with most of the gravel from my driveway. My plow guy believes in being thorough which means scraping off every last flake to reveal a pristine driveway. Pristine is NOT a word used to describe my driveway.
The thing I learned from this storm is that it’s been a long, long winter. It’s been miserable cold and we saw almost 10 feet total of snow just for the month of April. You can only watch so much Netflix or putter around the house so much before you get bored and worse, cabin fever.
It takes spring to remind me why I love living up here or at least until wildfire season starts up.
For now, things are melting at the Bar B.
