2024 Snowstorm

     It has been 65 years since Eastern Colorado saw the kind of snowstorm that hit in early November of 2024.  Two things qualify the November storm:  absence of wind, and quantity of heavy, wet snow on the level over a windy plain.

     I know of three such storms including the one in 1946-47.  The second one was in 1959-60.

     It was a little hard to believe that the November 2024 storm was happening.  Where we are  in Northern Colorado, we got rain, nearly an inch, but hardly any snow.

     The beneficial moisture delivered by the snowstorm came with some “collateral damage”.   I wouldn’t find out about that damage for nearly a month.  Not that it mattered.  I could not have done anything about it.  I still haven’t done much.

      I got the news on the Friday evening of December 5.  It came in a phone  call from my Grandson who had gone to the farm with his Dad hunting deer.  “Granddad, you know that shed where you keep your old tractors?”  “Yes.”

     “The roof collapsed.”

     Ouch.  He went on to explain that they hadn’t noticed until Friday afternoon because it was dark when they arrived on Thursday night.  They went out hunting early Friday morning, and when they came back, they saw it and looked into the matter. 

     And then called me.

 

     I made arrangements with Leslie, our caregiver to be on duty Sunday.  We went down Saturday.  Thankfully, the boys had the house warmed up so the Goodwife didn’t have to suffer the usual winter chill when we arrive and face a house in the 40’s.

      Sunday morning was bright and sunny, so I ventured out and pried open a couple of doors to look inside.

 

      The deer hunters had gone out at daybreak and came back while I was puttering around taking pictures, and looking.  The north end stayed pretty much intact, probably because I had it reinforced so I could use a chain hoist to life 500-pound flywheels and the like when I worked on the old 2-cylinder tractors.

 

      They set about shoveling the hard-packed snow that had slid off the roof and formed a rampart in front of the east doorway.  We managed to get a six-foot opening to enter the east side.

     They then devoted themselves to clearing the roof that lay mostly on the shed floor.

 

     They were much more successful at getting rid of that snow than they were in bagging a deer.

 

     They weren’t willing to risk life and limb to clean off the part of the roof residing on top of the tractors.  Good decision!

 

      Some irony:  I had a table made of an exterior door sitting on two saw horses.  On it were some gaskets that hadn’t made it onto one of the old tractors, the “R”, yet.  There were several small parts waiting to be found and put back on as I try to get the old gal back to running.  A service manual and a notebook with things to remember as I put it back together written in it were on the table.

    None of that was disturbed.  The paper work hadn’t even got wet.  I was able to remove all that and put it in the shop where I hope I can find it when I need it.

     Also undisturbed in the far southwest corner are a table saw and a miter saw covered with a plastic tarp.

     I did jack up some trusses that had broken on the north side and reinforced them with 2 X 4’s I had cut out of some of the downed trusses.

 

    Note the galvanized pipe between the wheels and beside the ceramic light fixture.  I hope they will do the job for awhile. 

    I used my remaining daylight and “Leslie time” to start pulling nails out of the roof metal that I could reach.  I will have to work my way south until I can prop up the south roof resting on the two tractors.  I’m off to a slow start.  I didn’t quite finish with one sheet.

     The insurance company assessed the damage less the deductible at $27K.  That’s only for the structure.  The contents must have their own insurance, which they are quick to tell you.

     What damage the “contents” suffered is a bit hard to tell right now.  The reel on the combine header has some bent bats.  The two tractors don’t seem to be too badly damaged.  Somewhere under there is a wood splitter. 

     As usual in Eastern Colorado, I am at the mercy of the weather.  I won’t be able to do much until it warms up. 

     I shudder to think that the rest of the winter of 2024-25 will follow the example of the other two heavy snow winters.  Will there be another three feet to come?

    

Snow Storms of Eastern Colorado

      The first one I know of was the winter of ’46—’47.

     Since I was born the summer of 1947, I wasn’t around for this one.  I’ve heard the stories.  Donna and Ellis were expecting their first child that winter.  They lived twenty miles north of Genoa.

     The roads were impassible for up to six weeks that winter.  Ellis decided Donna should be closer to the hospital, so he decided to take her down to his parents’ home just a couple of miles north of Genoa and on Highway 109 to Hugo and the hospital.

      Roads were impassable for ordinary vehicles, so they decided they must use the tractor.   But it wasn’t just any tractor.  It was a Minneapolis-Moline Comfortractor.

     The Comfortractor had a cab and fenders, like an automobile, but was designed to work in the field like a tractor.  It could go up to 40 mph on the road.  (https://wdm.ca/collections/comfortractor/ to get a picture and full details.)

    I don’t think Donna and Ellis approached anywhere near that speed, as I think it was a long day getting from the north farm to the south one.  There’s a lot more to that story that I don’t know.  Things turned out well for them, anyway.

    That winter,  Dad made a pair of skis out of tongue-and-groove siding with leather loops for toe holds.  Somehow, he soaked the tips and got a sufficient bend on the front end of them so they didn’t dig into the snow.  He could negotiate the snow, which was three or more feet deep on the level.  ”On the level” is a pretty rare phrase for a snow storm in Eastern Colorado.

     The other stories I recall from hearing them as a kid had to do with the bombers that delivered food for humans and livestock to the rural families who were stranded for up to six weeks before they could get out and get to town or get to some of the cattle herds.

     Most of the stories were about the inaccuracy of the bombing crews.  The folks got one delivery in a wooden case.  Dad had to go nearly a quarter of a mile south of the yard to retrieve the box containing mostly canned goods, I think.  He was able to do that on his homemade skis.

     Another neighbor, I don‘t remember which one, had the opposite problem.  The box that fell from the sky wiped out the end of his hay rack.

     Though such a winter presents difficulties, it also provides abundant crops for the following spring and summer.

     It would be another thirteen years before any snowstorm like that occurred again. We had plenty of snowstorms in the 50’s, but they were windy blizzards that stacked the snow in huge drifts on the south side of something.

      It was the winter of ’59—’60.  It snowed heavily on Labor Day weekend.

     A “town farmer” living in Genoa had to travel over twenty miles north into Washington County in the storm to drain the water out of his new tractor, sitting in a field where he was drilling wheat.  That snow melted off pretty quickly, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

     That year, the football coach arranged for Genoa to play their home games on Flagler’s field.  The Flagler field had lights and grass!  Our field had hard, old dirt which would have been quite muddy most game days.

     The games were probably not played on Friday night, as Flagler would have been using their own field on half of the Fridays.  Whatever night it was, it seemed it was always rainy-drizzly or snowy.  The early birds could park their cars along the sidelines of the field and watch in relative comfort. 

     Our parents never went to any of those games.  If I wanted to go, I had to finagle a ride, which I managed to do.  We never got there in time to park on the sidelines, so we watched the game outside in the mist, rain or snow, at least so it seemed.  We were young and didn’t mind the discomfort as long as we could be with our friends.

    Another drawback was I had to wait for the team to shower, dress and return from the game to get a ride home.  That could be up to an hour, and I was tired.  Late to bed, and then up at regular time to go to school.  Not fun, but the sacrifice was worth it to see the game with my friends. 

     In January of 1960, Dad had to go to Denver to a hospital for surgery, a procedure that now would probably be performed in the doctor’s office.  He had to be there the night before.  It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, as we were all standing in the yard bidding our parents goodbye.  Mom would take him to the hospital and then return home.

      We were in shirt sleeves on a warm January day.  Dad said through his open car window, “Well, it looks like you’ll have some good weather while I’m gone.”  We had to do the chores in his absence, and even after he came home, because he couldn’t lift anything for something like six weeks following the procedure.

     Mom drove home in a snowstorm, fortunately not a blizzard, but so much for good weather.  It was quite dark with fairly deep snow when she arrived.

    On school days, Mom rolled us out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m.  Brother John was in charge of feeding and milking the two milk cows.  The rest of us had to haul hay to the beef cattle and chop the ice and fill the stock tank with water.

     We could feed cattle with the ’50 Ford pickup or the tractor, which had a Farmhand with hay fork mounted on it.  There constantly arose two problems:  snow too deep around the hay stack and the corral, and the tractor often would not start on the cold mornings.  The battles to get that John Deere G started were epic, and usually unsuccessful.

 Many days we ended up hauling hay with pitch forks through the snow drifts and into the feed rack.  Dad didn’t like baled hay, said bales dried the hay out.  So we stacked loose millet in a stack in September, then pulled it out and fed it to the cattle all winter long.  Pulling the hay out of the stack and making a pile of suitable size for hauling it to the corral and throwing it over the fence with a pitchfork was time-consuming hard work, complicated by the frequent snowstorms.

     We were supposed to have semester tests on the second week of school in January.  It wouldn’t do to be tardy or absent.  When the cattle had been cared for, we went in to breakfast and listened to the radio.  Sure enough, no school.  Bad weather and impassable roads. 

     I remember the radio announcer saying, after about the third cancellation, that we Genoa kids would have to wait until next week to take our semester tests.  The announcement was greeted with mixed emotions.  Normally, a no-school day was quite welcome.  But after struggling for a couple of hours with chores, it would have been nice to know we had all day to do them instead of trying to get them done and on the road by 7:30 or 8:00.

       We did have some warm weather, enough to thaw some of the snow.  Then, it got cold again, and we discovered that the melted snow had turned to ice in the  hay stack.  After that, it was impossible to pull hay out of parts of the stack with a pitch fork.  We had to resort to a dull hay knife, a tool that had teeth like sickle sections and a handle like a lumberjack’s saw in the days before chainsaws. We had to saw the frozen hay out in chunks, until we got deep enough into the stack where the moisture had not penetrated or hadn’t frozen.

     After it thawed some, we could load the Ford pickup with hay and drive into the corral to unload, provided it wasn’t too muddy. Or we could get there early in the morning before the mud thawed.

     Well, we survived, and so did the cattle. It was the muddiest year I can ever remember.   In the Spring, when it didn’t freeze overnight, we had to put chains on the pickup to negotiate the muddy yard and corral.

     The county roads were soft and muddy, too.  Many a day we were late to school because of slugging slowly through the mud, even having to rely on neighboring farmers to pull our school bus out of muddy spots.  The wet winter was followed by a wet spring.  Mud, mud everywhere.

      All the dams in pastures filled and overflowed.  Then the weather dried up and so did the watering holes.  We were back to normal in Eastern Colorado.

     All of this was a prelude to the story of winter of 2024—2025.  Of course, the story isn’t finished, but I can tell the 2024 part of the story.  Next time.