Winter in Wyoming
Posted: Thursday, November 03, 2011
by Jack H. Schick
We lived through eleven Wyoming winters. The state is technically a desert, but since it’s at such a high elevation and so cold in the winter, the snow it does get tends to pile up and stick around for a while. Several old jokes about the state are: “Wyoming has only three seasons--winter, July and August;” and, “If summer is on a weekend this year, can we have a picnic?” Our first year living there, we got six inches of snow on June 19th and seven inches on September 11th. The most severe storm during our time there was May 5th through 7th when Thunder Basin Grasslands got over 50 inches. The worst snow storm we personally experienced was 32 inches in 19 hours with 45 mile per hour northerly winds.
One night, it was snowing and blowing hard when I drove home form work at 11pm. When I got up in the next morning it was still snowing and the wind was howling. I couldn’t open the south facing front door or see out the windows on that side of the house. The northerly blast had literally buried us. I could get out the back door, though. There was a strip of bare ground about five feet wide along the up wind side of the house. A ten foot drift that looked like an ocean wave frozen at the point of breaking reach up to the eaves. The stinging swoosh of the driven snow rushed over the gap and across the roof. On the down wind side, the snow was piled up against the side of the house covering the windows and front door. A huge bank of snow was piled up all the way to the roof. The vehicles out front were totally covered, just mounds of snow obscured by the raging ground blizzard. It was obvious I was going no where that day so I called off work.
The next day they managed to get the “old road” plowed open for a few hours. The Interstate was hopeless. The drifts across it were twelve feet deep at places and the wind was still blowing hard. I was able to fight my way into Casper and stayed at a motel for a few days so I could get to work at the refinery. A couple of days later, about the time we were starting to get ourselves dug out, the wind shifted back to westerly. Drifts that were oriented north to south suddenly shifted west to east and we had to start digging again, throwing the snow in a different direction this time.
Wyoming winters are hard on wildlife. One year we had knee deep snow cover for six weeks. Several different periods during that time it was well below zero. The snow became ice crusted from the occasional warmer days, so animals couldn’t get to the grass to feed. I saw freezing, starving antelope along the Interstate fence on the way to work in the morning and knew they would be dead before the day was over. The following hunting season game was scarce and the prairie was scattered with bones. During one exceptionally cold spell—that means 25-35 below zero—the rabbits came out of the brush and rocks to get warm on the highway. In the ten miles between my place and Casper, I counted 96 dead rabbits on just the north bound lanes, smashed flat by cars. Needless to say, the rabbit hunting was bad for a couple of years.
Every year in Wyoming there is at least one fatality caused by the winter weather. An unfortunate person becomes stranded and tries to walk to safety. They find the frozen body days later. Sometimes, even staying with a vehicle is not a guarantee of survival as temperatures drop or carbon monoxide builds up. In a state that is over twice the size of Pennsylvania with, at that time, less than half a million people, rescue can be a long time coming. Fortunately we were never despirately stranded or broken down in adverse winter conditions.
One winter we had an exceptional number of snow storms. It was about half a mile of dirt road from my place to the pavement. At several places the dirt road was sunken with earthen banks on either side. During blowing snow storms those sections of the road would fill in and be impassable. That year I had my tire chains on and off 26 times. I would stop at the end of the pavement, put them on and ‘blast’ my way in to the house. The next morning I’d take them off when I got back on the black top. The closest we got to being stuck happened that year.
I worked rotating shifts and my wife worked second shift. We picked up the three kids at the baby sitters at about 11:30 pm and headed home. There were a couple of feet of snow on the ground and the wind was roaring out of the west. We stopped at the end of the pavement and I put the tire chains on our two-wheel drive pick-up truck. The familiar sunken spot in the road was nearly drifted shut. I hit the drift at a substantial speed, but smack in the middle, we bogged down. I got out and frantically dug while my wife rocked the truck back and forth. The wind was filling in snow around the vehicle as fast as I shoveled.
We were only a few hundred yards from the house and knew we could hike it if we had to, but we didn’t want to abandon the vehicle blocking the road. By morning it would be buried to the hood and would require a bulldozer to get it out. Fortunately, a big four wheel drive came along and pulled us through. It was the closest we ever were to being hopelessly stuck. Had we been in a more remote area we might have been stuck there for days. With the truck drifted in over the hood, running the engine would have meant death by asphyxiation, not running it would have meant death by hypothermia.
In Wyoming people are expected to help others who are stuck or broken down. Very few would even consider not stopping to help, because they realize what could happen. Our neighbor, “Granny” we called her, took advantage of that fact. She only had a car, not a four wheel drive. When she needed to get to town when the roads were drifted shut, she'd get up some speed and plow as far into the drift as she could. Then she'd just sit there with the radio on blocking the road. People trying to get to work or into town in four wheel drive vehicles would dig her out and pull her through, simply to clear the path. She never even had to get out of her car, just give it the gas when they signaled her to.
Sometimes the problem with Wyoming winters is not the snow but the cold. When the wind chill got to 65 or 70 below zero they closed schools. That happened several times during the few years our kids attended there. Once, during one of those exceptionally cold, windy days, I walked about 150 feet over to a fire wood pile to bring in some fuel for the stove. I wasn’t dressed properly. Walking back to the house, into the wind, I realized that it was the coldest air I’d ever experienced. Within a few minutes of getting inside, a half a dozen small white specks formed on my cheeks. A few days later they were scabs. In that brief period of bare skin exposure I’d gotten frostbite.
Wyoming is not Alaska or Siberia. The coldest it ever got during our 12 years there was only 39 below zero. Usually, during the coldest days, the wind is still. During the week between Christmas and New Year one year, it got up to 9 below zero one day. Other than that, the warmest daytime temperature for the entire week was 19 below. On four of the nights it dropped to less than 32 below zero.
I was working third shift at the oil refinery the night it hit 39 below. The plant was located along the solidly frozen North Platte River in the city of Casper. As I made my routine rounds of the tank fields, the few inches of snow on the ground crunched and squeaked under my insulated boots. The air was relatively humid from industrial processes and human habitation. On the still, frigid night frost formed in the air and fell as huge glittering snow flakes. Six inches of fresh “snow” covered the ground by morning. If anything froze up that week, it stayed frozen.
I’ve experienced cold, snowy days during my decades in Pennsylvania. I’ve negotiated raging blizzards driving across Nebraska. I’ve seen the weather reports from Cut Bank, Montana. I’ve seen the snow fall records of the Sierras. I’ve read about life in Alaska. I lived in Wyoming, though. I experienced the winters there face to face. It wasn’t all bad though. We had some great weather there, too. I can honestly say, I never saw it snow in August; in July, yes, but not in August. Several years summer actually was on a weekend. We had a picnic, but the wind blew sand in our food.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Just reading this made me cold. I had an honest physical reaction. You were effective.Thanks for reading and commenting
I remember the "blast" through that snow drift. Everything else is filler for the memory!Thanks for reading and commenting.
Dont forget the winter of 1979-1980. 1 month period had a high of 20 below with 90 degree wind chill factor. 115 inches of snow that winter. 26" thanksgiving eve.yep- I remember it. That's the 32 inches in 19 hrs storm in paragraph one. and the big storm in paragraph 3. I lived in Homa Hills, 10 miles north of Casper.
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