Looks like it might snow. This has been amazing. It’s been years since we had a winter like this, and there’s no end in sight. The skiing has been good if you can get to it, which has been challenging. I’ve had some really good days, and some really discouraging days in the flat light. The brochure said it would snow at night and be bluebird perfect during the daytime hours. Not so. It just keeps coming. I haven’t seen a shadow in a long time.
I pretty much am the Public Works department in my area. I have to keep several places plowed on the ranch and I am losing ground on it. It’s not full panic mode yet, but there’s no question that it’s harder and harder to find a place to put the snow. My blower, all 6 feet and 40 horsepower of it, has been choking on the wet stuff. It clogs the chute and breaks shear pins. There’s a layer of ice under all of it making basic traction tricky. The piles where the driveways meet the highway are huge and rock solid. There used to be a mailbox in there somewhere.
Mostly, I can keep things clear with a relatively new tractor with a closed cab and a nice heater. It’s a sort of mid-range machine — small enough that I can get it in where I need it, but generally big enough to do the job. But not big enough to move the big piles of frozen-up gunk at the corner of the driveway, or the glacier that came off the barn roof. For that I needed to bring out the heavy stuff.
It’s conditions like this that led my aunt to observe that, when you come right down to it, we are only about one broken hydraulic hose away from cannibalism. The biggest tractor on the ranch is a 40-year-old John Deere with four-wheel drive and a huge front-end loader. We relied on it for years to keep the place open. Operating it is a miserable experience. It’s the old-school, open-station-style tractor. It’s so big you can’t really see what’s happening with the loader way out in front of you, and after 40 years, enough slop in the controls that you’re never completely sure what will move when you pull on the stick. You can do some serious damage in a hurry with a machine like that. To top it off, after we bought it, we discovered that the exhaust stack was too tall to fit in the shed. My uncle did the farmer thing and cut it off. So the exhaust blows right in your face.
I’ve kept it here for conditions like these, those rare Donner Party winters. It doesn’t get much use otherwise. It started right up, but when I was driving down the highway to get to where I needed it, I learned that the tires had flat spots where they had been sitting for a couple of years. So it was a real rodeo experience bucking down the road.
But I got things pushed back enough to last for another round or two, and am banking on the January Thaw to rescue me later in the month. I couldn’t wait for the thaw to get the snow load off some of the old sheds, and enlisted some of the family to shovel nearly 3 feet of very dense snow off a couple of roofs. That’s normally a February thing.
Winter is definitely in charge. UDOT, the county and city have all done a great job clearing the streets, day after day. They, too, are losing ground. I saw a couple of UDOT’s guys at the Chevron in Kamas, grabbing coffee and doughnuts on a rare and short break. They looked tired and worn out. Park City is hauling snow out of town, which isn’t cheap. UDOT has their biggest equipment out, pushing things back. The garbage trucks are stuck, and if there is a pick-up schedule, nobody has a clue what it is. Give your plow guy a hug.
The weight of this snow is unusual for us. It isn’t behaving like we’re used to. Roofs that are supposed to slide off aren’t sliding, or slide with a terrifying crash. It’s not falling out of the trees, and trees are breaking off. I’ve had a couple land on my road. A huge fir that has been leaning across the highway for a year finally broke off and landed across the road, blocking things for a couple of hours. I can’t get that tragic accident at the Canyons out of my mind. A tree falling on the lift cable, flinging a guy out of the chair and falling to his death. That’s as random as a lightning strike. As I write this, details are still sketchy, but we know he was 29-year-old Christian Helger, a ski patroller and a resident of Millcreek. He was a fellow skier, out there doing what he loved, and the sudden loss is heartbreaking for his friends and family. God bless, man.