The Last Word On Nothing

As I write this, the forecast calls for snow in the next day or so. It won’t be enough at my house, and certainly will be insufficient for the mountains. No matter how much snow falls at this point, it will be nowhere near enough to make up for our absolutely abysmal winter here in Colorado.

I live here, so I see it every day, and everyone I know talks about it, also pretty much every day. “I heard we’re supposed to get a couple inches.” “I need to remember to water my trees, because I think the buds are coming in a month early.” “My family was supposed to go skiing for spring break, but I saw a picture of the back bowls, and there’s like, nothing.”

It’s easy to dismiss our concern as something limited to the rich, mostly white people who ski as a hobby. Ski country is a big part of our economy, first of all. But our lack of snow in the Rockies is absolutely about more than ski conditions. There just isn’t going to be any water coming off these mountains come spring, let alone summer. And tens of millions of Americans will feel it.

I wrote about this in the Atlantic last week, and I can’t even keep track of how many people here have thanked me for it, or brought it up in random situations — tennis practice, school pickup, kid activities. The rest of America needs to know what we’re dealing with, they say. I agree.

I pitched the story because I have been frustrated by the frequency of complaints on social media about the East Coast’s winter. I know it has been snowing a lot and it has been cold! We would give almost anything to have those conditions, so please spare me. I am worried about the state of Colorado burning down this summer. I am worried about Lake Powell hitting dead pool and seeing a dry riverbed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

I talked to a lot of people for that Atlantic piece, and as is always the case, so many of their helpful insights and comments didn’t make it into the final story. One that stands out in particular was a discussion with Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist. We talked about how people have a hard time grasping just how much snow falls throughout the Rocky Mountains all winter, from early October through the end of April and even into May or June.

It is a mind-blowing amount of snow. Hundreds and hundreds of inches of snow fall, and that packed snow sits underneath trees, in rocky valleys, on steep slopes, and in long glacial plains between ranges. Right now, there is almost nothing in some of those plains. South-facing slopes are melting fast, and it is one of the worst seasons in recent memory in terms of avalanche danger. The snowpack feeds some of the country’s mightiest rivers, which flow to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean both. They include the Colorado River, arguably the most-managed river on Earth — supplier of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, carver of the Grand Canyon, provider of water to 40 million Americans.

“Colorado is a headwater state. We don’t have any rivers that flow into Colorado, but we have rivers that flow out in all directions,” Schumacher told me. “The snow that falls in our mountains is the water that goes into those rivers, that serves tens of millions of people for agriculture, drinking water, everything that we need water for in the West. Most of that snow originates in the mountains.”

And we do not have enough. We have about half the median amount, in fact. Snowpack is essential to the West. We have rarely seen such bad numbers since the Dust Bowl.

Maybe you can see why this has become somewhat of an obsession for me this winter. I am also kind of fixated on the lack of interest from practically anyone who doesn’t live here. Just wait. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California are going to suffer — let alone upper-basin states Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah — and you will hear about it soon enough.

The storms forecast to snow starting tomorrow, while they won’t be enough, are absolutely vital to our way of life. The flakes are about this weekend’s ski trips, but also about the alfalfa that will come in for harvest several months from now. Snow is about mountain communities’ economic security. It’s about the entire atmosphere, paving the way for the summer thunderstorms that flow from the mountains to the prairies.

Snowpack is past, present, and future, embedded in glistening walls of white covering every slope and every crevasse of every peak. In Colorado, snow is everything.

Photos: Top, snow crystal from Wikimedia Commons; inline, Colorado’s central mountains, including the Sangre de Cristo Range and the Sawatch Range, by me from January-February