Chaos Blizzard

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Is today really Tuesday? It seems like Thursday or some day that is later in the week—it feels like I’ve done more work this week for it to be a Tuesday. Either way, it’s Tuesday. It was a good day, too. We had a jumbled mess of employees showing up at the St. Mary Visitor Center. We had backcountry rangers, information technology guys, bookstore folks, media contractors, revegetation crews, and a few of our seasonal interpretive staff. By the afternoon things settled into a more calm disoriented mess, but we still got things done. It’s really hard to calm everyone down and get work done, when there are new things happening. New things are happening and new people are arriving. It was a good Tuesday.

The weather did prove to distract us a bit from our work. It decided blizzard a bit. In the St. Mary Valley it’s pretty easy for a rain cloud to come down the Continental Divide and carry snow blowing. The wind comes from the St. Mary Lake. It only makes sense that a sudden drop in elevation from the Continental Divide down to the lake creates a huge tunnel of flowing air. I looked outside and saw the snow blowing horizontally. It stuck to all the post and metal poles outside, but not too much on the ground.

Those were the two big events today: chaos and blizzard…it was a good mix.

Weather: 40’s-30’s Snow, rain and wind. Some random sunshine, too.