Fall is winding down, though not over yet. The official winter forecasts are piling up like fallen leaves, and they are randomly blowing all over the place.
This is officially an El Nino year, which over many years had proven to be completely meaningless in Utah’s weather. All the maps showing the dramatic weather changes caused by the warming Pacific Ocean end up showing Utah in a blank spot, indicating a high probability of a highly normal winter. Whatever that might be.
This year is supposed to be a super El Nino, meaning that it is even more dramatic in its impact, and the maps still indicate that Utah will experience an even more dramatically normal winter.
Colorado, on the other hand, is supposed to get slammed. If you are talking to friends and family considering a winter vacation, you might want to suggest that conditions in Colorado will be much better than here. Just sayin’.
More specific ski industry forecasts point to a pretty good chance of having a better than normal winter here, but they aren’t calling for a repeat of last year’s record snowfall. Water resource managers have gone into the winter with reservoirs more full than normal, taking advantage of last year’s excess and holding it back just in case this winter disappoints.
The best science has to offer is an extreme shrug, with normal temperatures and precipitation. That’s not very satisfying, and they aren’t about to go out on a limb and get more specific than that. But when push comes to shove, who are you going to trust — a bunchy of pointy headed scientists with supercomputers crunching numbers and analyzing decades of hard data? I don’t think so. When it comes to weather forecasting, I turn to folklore.
The Farmers’ Almanac published a list of 20 signs of a hard winter ahead. Most of them seem like things that happen every winter no matter what the conditions: “The squirrel gathers nuts early.” Well, squirrels gather nuts all the time. That’s what they eat. “Heavy and numerous frogs in August,” is another signal. I did not get around to counting or weighing the frogs last August. “Pigs gathering sticks” is another indicator. I’m fresh out of pigs, so I don’t know what they were up to.
The gold standard for winter forecasting is this: “See how high the hornet’s nest, ’twill tell how high the snow will rest.” Any time you can reduce an entire scientific field like meteorology to a nice iambic couplet, you know it’s got to be right.
With the storm this week, the leaves have thinned out, and I can see the into the tops of the trees. The hornets have spoken — they are building their nests in the tops of the trees. Not quite the highest branches, but very near the top. There are a few that are midway up the tree, and almost no outliers that built near the ground. The consensus among the hornets is that we should stock up on canned chili, another Donner party winter is on the way.
The nests are smaller than normal this year. Typically, they are football-sized by now. I haven’t seen more than a couple that big, and most are about half that size. I have no idea what it means if they build smaller nests. Maybe there are fewer hornets. But if you can’t believe barely sentient insects when it comes to long-range weather forecasting, who can you believe?
News came from Canada this week that somebody paid $145,000 for a condominium parking spot in Whistler. The price paid for parking may indicate a heavy winter. Or not. If the buyer had stuck the same cash in an account earning 4%, which is entirely possible now, it would earn $5,800 a year in interest. At even a high $40/day rate, that’s 145 days of parking in a ski season that doesn’t last much longer than that. Access is guaranteed. The space is reserved 24/7 so it can sit empty if the owner isn’t skiing 145 days a year.
Locally, Park City Mountain offered a limited number of season parking passes for about the same price as the Epic Locals ski pass. They still require a reservation so that if the parking pass holder isn’t using the space, somebody else can pay to park there. The space gets used, which seems a whole lot better than the condominium Whistler space.
Something’s wrong when the parking costs more than the event you are attending. If a local skier pays the day rate to park at Park City Mountain even 30 times over the course of the season, parking is about the same as the Epic Locals pass. If you ski a lot more than that, parking is the biggest expense of the season. The gross margins on parking have to be a lot better than on skiing. This year, the city bus system will actually connect the Richardson Flat park-and-ride lot directly to the ski resorts. Clearly the better option.
The hornets have not opined on the cost or availability of parking for the upcoming season. It doesn’t take any science to know that it will be a problem.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.