When I talk to long-time residents of the mountains, whether it be here in the Rockies, or in the Sierra in California, they tell me they have seen it snow all twelve months of the year. I haven’t seen it snow all twelve months, but I have seen it snow at our house here in Nederland ten months of the year, so it shouldn’t surprise me that we can get an early snow in September. Still, I was a bit saddened last night, when it turned cold, and snow began to fall. Temperatures fell into the mid-20s, and this morning I woke to an inch of snow on the ground. I normally love the sight of snow, but I know in this case, the cold and snow mean the end of our fall color season here. And early hard freeze kills the leaves, and generally they just turn brown and fall off the trees. Unfortunately, they were just starting their strong color show this week, and I had thought they would peak in the next two weeks at our elevation. But, as they say, you can not control the weather.
I guess in the scheme of things, I’d rather have an inch of early snow, than what happened last year this time. It was on this date, during this week, that we experienced record rains and flooding in this part of Colorado. Experts called it a 1000-year rain event, and many people lost their homes. We were merely inconvenienced by having to drive on back roads for a month, tripling our commute to Boulder from 20 minutes to one hour. It was so surreal, that I wrote a long story about our experiences, calling it the Great Flood of 2013. So while the rest of the country remembers yesterday for attacks on our country from 13 years ago, what’s more on my mind is the power of weather.
