Surviving (?) Snowpocalypse
For the first time in eight years of Colorado mountain living, I am snowed in
I again woke up feeling like I was a hundred years old. This creaky soreness has been my default setting for months now. It started when I increased my running volume after the new year, then grew amid my quixotic determination to continue increasing weights at the gym. Then, just as I finally felt fit, my lazy-brained clumsiness kicked in and I took a few hard falls. The most recent fall happened two weeks ago in the desert when a swirling gust of wind blew me over into the rocks and (I think) resulted in a cracked rib. The rib is at least bruised. It effectively hurts as much as it did two weeks ago and I don’t know how long I can keep leaning on Aleve to get through the day. I’ve only run twice in the past two weeks as a result of this injury. I can hike without too much pain, but running — Ouch. The injury might have turned a corner if it wasn’t for the arrival of a massive spring snowstorm. This storm has kicked my ass in ways I didn’t even realize were possible, and I’m not yet free. No, I’m not nearly free.
By Wednesday morning, weather forecasts were beginning to sound dire. One of my favorite weather blogs, BoulderCAST, tweeted “Our team is having some ‘shock and awe’ type of conversations about what is about to unfold in the next 48 hours in Denver, Boulder, and nearby Foothills. Can’t shake the feeling this may end up as a catastrophic event for the Foothills, possibly in spots down here too.”
Most forecast models predicted two to four feet of snow in the Foothills, with higher amounts possible. I live in the Foothills. I also live on a private road that is not plowed by the county. Beat owns a Toyota Tundra with a snowplow, but I have never tried driving it and don’t even know how to operate the plow. I admit my ignorance is my fault. Beat loves plowing, like a little boy playing with Tonka trucks, so he only made half-hearted offers to teach me this self-sufficiency skill. Since even normal winter driving causes anxiety, I hesitated.
Knowing this big snow was coming, and lacking the skills to battle it, I pivoted to the “hunker down” strategy. Hours before the storm was set to arrive, I had an appointment scheduled for a follow-up to a recent routine mammogram. The need for a follow-up mammogram was anxiety-inducing in itself, and then my second set of images was suspicious enough that I had to wait for an ultrasound. As I sat in the waiting room pondering how I would react to suspicions of breast cancer, the sky outside became increasingly ominous. Watching the sky with little else to do, my anxiety climbed to that irrational place where I felt no choice but to take flight, sneak out of the room in my hospital gown, and race home before the storm hit. Not only because I wanted to beat the snow home, but because I was too fragile for bad news at a time like this. Luckily, the ultrasound put the radiologist’s concerns to rest, at least for now.
Driving home, the snow hadn’t yet started, so I took the opportunity to indulge in the Colorado tradition of storm panic shopping. Normally I don’t worry about these sorts of things. Like most American families, at any given time Beat and I have enough calories stashed away to last a month or more. But the combination of Beat being in Alaska, me having just returned from a two-week trip to Utah, and a recent pantry scouring where I tossed out all of the expired food, the house was quite low on edibles. Big storms almost always knock out our power, so I didn’t want to rely on refrigerated items. Beyond that, I couldn’t think straight. My anxiety still had control over deeper thought, so I flitted in and out of grocery aisles in a confused fog. I managed to return home with the supplies pictured above, which honestly wasn’t a bad haul. The toilet paper was overkill, but I think anxiety returned my mind to “Covid times” and reached for the most valuable commodity.
A combination of heavy rain and graupel began pelting the ground around 4 p.m., about an hour after I returned. Great, now we’ll have a layer of ice under feet of snow. Just great. I decided to stock up on firewood before the pathway to the garage was buried. This was particularly painful for my rib, so I made more than a dozen trips with increasingly smaller loads.
My anxiety finally calmed enough for me to doze off around midnight, but I was woken abruptly at 1 a.m. by a crashing boom that sounded like thunder. Thundersnow? Probably! I looked out the window. Sure enough, blizzard conditions with high winds and heavy snow swirled outside. It hadn’t started snowing in earnest until almost 10 p.m.; in three hours it looked like at least eight inches had already accumulated.
After the thundersnow adrenaline rush, my whirling mind needed hours to fall back asleep. But I must have dozed off because another loud noise woke me up at 4:30 a.m. — the fire alarm. The shrill blaring sent me darting in full chicken-with-no-head panic around the house, searching for smoke. The wood stove had cooled down but a half dozen electronic devices were clicking and whirring and blaring, including Beat’s coffee machine and the high-powered fan in the bike trainer room. It was as though a ghost — or a prowler! — had crept around the house to turn random things on. It took me at least five minutes to conclude that the power had been off and just came back on, somehow triggering all of these devices. I haven’t experienced an adrenaline rush like that in years. I was definitely up for the day now. Outside, the wind howled and the snow depth was well over a foot.
By morning, everything was buried and the shoveling began in earnest. I knew it was going to snow a lot more, but wanted to get ahead where I could. This was wet and heavy stuff, with at least an inch of water to every foot of powder. My rib screamed during every initial lift, but like most pain, it numbed with time. I was pleased with how strong my arms, shoulders, and back felt, though. My upper body used to fatigue quickly during efforts like this. Apparently, my quixotic gyming is doing some good.
Over the day, I spent three and a half hours shoveling. My efforts barely made a dent. By evening, the snow was officially crotch-deep. I tried several measurements with a tape measure. Given the wind, I got varying numbers, but the average in the most wind-protected spots landed between 37 and 40 inches of snow. The folks just west of me and a thousand feet higher received anywhere from 45 to 55 inches.
My internet had been out for most of the day, threatening to disrupt my remote work shift. I tried troubleshooting everything I could think of, to the point where I had Beat on his satellite phone as he crossed the Kaltag Portage in 20-below sunshine, taking his suggestions. Finally, I went outside to scout the Starlink dish — which Beat had assured me could not be the problem — and noticed it was covered in icicles. The dish is 20 feet off the ground at the top of a tall gate. Irrationally — instead of looking for the ladder or just calling into work because damn, I’m not that important — I climbed up this icy, wobbly gate 15 feet off the ground and knocked at the dish with my snow shovel. This could have ended quite badly, but it was the solution. The Internet was back!
By Friday morning, the 36-hour storm had finally cleared. I began working with two of my neighbors to clear the road. With Beat’s truck, neighbor Dan and I made little progress — I’d call it negative progress. He had taken out the truck the previous evening and driven it about 300 yards before it became high-centered near a curve. Overnight, at least 10 more inches of snow had fallen and the six-foot-high berm in front of the plow had turned to solid ice. That’s the problem with this wet snow. As soon as it compacts, it becomes ice, which makes it nearly impossible to move.
Dan and I spent more than an hour with an avalanche shovel and a garden shovel, chipping away at the ice piles around and under the truck. For that intensely strenuous effort, we were rewarded with the truck’s freedom but unable to drive it any farther forward (into the ice berm) or backward (which is steeply uphill.) So the truck still sits in the middle of the road.
Neighbor Greg has achieved significantly more progress with his snowblower, which — go Greg! I can imagine how strenuous it must be to operate on a steep slope in three feet of cement snow. But I can also imagine how much time it would take to snowblow a mile of road. Greg — go Greg! — appeared to be back at it this morning. Me — I have lots of pasta sauce and nowhere that I absolutely have to be until early Friday morning, when I need to catch a flight to Fairbanks for the White Mountains 100.
A 100-miler in Alaska in a week? I can hardly fathom it right now. I’m in so much pain and struggling to walk a quarter mile here and there. Yesterday, greatly aided by Greg’s snowblowing, I managed four miles to the mailbox and back to pick up a medication. But today — Saturday — as I started to ponder exactly how I’m going to get to the airport if the sun doesn’t melt enough of this snow for us before Thursday, I headed down the road to start breaking the “trail” I’ll want to take if I need to hike all of my travel and race supplies into town and catch an Uber from Boulder.
I made it just over a quarter of a mile. This 0.3 miles took me 20 minutes, downhill. Three feet of wet powder have consolidated into 2.5 feet of wet cement, and now there’s an inch of snowshoe-grabbing sun crust on top. It was hard. It was too hard. Defeated, I turned for home, unable to imagine any place in this world where this 100-year-old-seeming body could move freely enough to cover 100 miles.
Just two weeks ago in Utah, I felt so fit. And now, one desert dust devil and one Snowpocalypse later, I’m broken. But I’m not giving up. I am going back out there with my snow shovel. I’m going to continue chipping away at this inch by inch while telling my bruised rib to stop whining. I’m going to find a way to that airport. And I’m going to start that damn race.
One way or another.
Oh my goodness Jill I now understand the anxiety you were experiencing and I’m so sorry you had to deal with all this. Im so sorry that started with the mammogram & ultrasound experience. It’s so scary to experience and it can definitely cause bad anxiety. I’m so glad it turned out well for you 🩷🌸
I hope you are able to get to Alaska for the White Mountain 100 and that you will be pain free. You might try adding Tylenol 8 hour (Arthritis) to your Aleve pain regime. I take Meloxicam which is a prescribed anti-inflammatory med like Aleve only stronger. It doesn’t really help with pain so much so I add the Tylenol and it helps helps a lot.
As always my best to you! May you have a very successful 100 miler.
Sincerely
Linda
.. i heard 4’ Colorado snow predicted the other day.. (been paying careful attention to NA SnowPack this winter for numerous reasons !) & just yesterday (Saturday) asked my Love if she heard any followup.. WoW ! Your ‘substack post = Phenomenal Followup ! Have cousins ‘off the grid’ above Nelson BC - Kootenay Lake - Canada & ideally get their update today.. fyi .. sounds like ‘rib tissue injury to me.. very slow to heal & even a sneeze or laugh can set healing back another 2 weeks till next sneeze.. or.. you finally get over the hump if it. Yes yes.. have had all sorts of rib injuries & at 6’ 3” about 172 lbs the last 55 years or so gots little or no padding re contact sport falls - snowboarding skiing basketball football hockey - not to mention farm life
But I digress - the inevitable ‘melt’ or thaw or refreeze processes & changes ‘could be maybe’ Good Bad or Real Ugly > & any subsequent precipitation who knows ? But I bet you gots the Sources for a bit of heads up - daily or even hourly.. especially Day vs Night too.. will stay tuned here in Toronto & hope for the best .. for The West ! Thanks so muchly for the facts & pics.. priceless ! 🦎🏴☠️🇨🇦