Trego's Mountain Ear

It is Monday as I write this.  Half a century ago, I would have been beginning the February 1 run of Snow Surveys – driving a Ski-Doo Alpine that looked something like this:

It was kind of like getting a job in heaven – every year we got one new snowmachine, and our oldest machine would go off to a gentler route.  My first year, I had a 440 engine, and after that my snow survey career was driving 640 machines.  The old 292 engines were still in use on the easier runs.

Mondays were Weasel Divide, Stahl Peak and Grave Creek snow courses.  For those readers who have visited Weasel Cabin, in the old days, when real men did snow surveys (as I was reminded) they snowshoed or skied in from Burma Road, started a fire in the cabin’s stove, measured the snow, and went back to the cabin to cook a steak.  The next day the real men would trek up Stahl, overnight in the lookout, then ski or snowshoe out to sample Grave Creek and down the road to the waiting pickup.  I had it easy – though today all the data is available through the internet.

I never measured a record high snowfall.  Those peak years were before my time, and after my time.  Still, the 1977 January record still stands for the record low – 10.2 inches of snow-water equivalent on Stahl.  In some ways the technology is unchanged – a rubber pillow, filled with antifreeze, records the weight of the snow on top of it to tell how much water there is in the snow.  On the other hand, a half-century ago, that pillow was connected to a clockwork chart that we had to wind up each trip.  We had the beginnings of telemetry when I worked snow surveys – but breakdowns were frequent.  Those Alpines carried a lot of batteries and spare parts.

So, as I look at the readings on Stahl today, I see that there are 21 inches of water sitting on the pillow. Dead on for the average.  Less than the median – and, since those calculations are made only on the last 30 years of data, my record low measurement is no longer present, nor is the 1991 record high.

For the year, the most important snow measurements, as Stahl’s chart below shows, don’t occur with the January or February 1 releases – as you can see, low snowfall in January has moved Stahl’s snowpack from well above average to right at the average as I write this.  It seemed strange a half-century ago that the snowfall that determined how much water would be in the mountains occurs in March and April.  In 1977, the snow hit Buffalo, New York.