The Four Seasons of Grand County

I’m assuming that anyone who reads this Blog lives in a typical, human-friendly environment that has four seasons. You live by those seasons, as they control and define your temperaments, your wardrobes, your activities, and certainly your ESPN schedule – they are the clock that controls your life. Atypical environments – Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, The Moon, and Columbia, Mo – don’t have four seasons; they might have two, maybe three, and that makes them uninhabitable by mortals who demand the normalcy of an acceptable human existence. (OK, I’m kidding about Columbia, MO having less than four seasons.)
I’ve never lived in Columbia, Mo, and I no longer live in Shawnee, Ks – I now reside in Hot Sulphur Springs, a town so small that unless you had to pee really badly or were in desperate need of a bag of chips and a tank of gas, you wouldn’t remember that you drove through it on your way from here to anywhere. But this is Grand County, Co, and we still have four seasons! They are as follows:
- Pre Winter
- Kick your ass, freeze your butt, bury you with snow, make the power company rich, kick your ass again, Oh God I’m cold!, How many more years before summer?, I can’t even begin to feel my ass anymore Winter
- Post Winter
- Spr-ummer-fall

We’ll start with Pre-winter, which generally begins sometime in late July or early August. I know you’re thinking that in most parts of the US, late July or early August are generally the beginning of the ‘dog days’ of summer. In northeastern Kansas, the dog days meant a continual stream of 90+ degree days with little or no precipitation; the green and lush bluegrass lawn that you worked so hard to attain in the spring has turned into a dormant, dusty brown plot with a few strands of nut grass popping up here and there. You sit on the back deck in the evening in a dry heat, listening to the cicadas do there thing amongst the drying leaves of the moisture-starved hardwoods. It drags on to the point where you’re not only ready for a cold snap, you’re praying for it. Not so in Grand County – Pre-Winter is that little reality check that dumps two feet of snow on August 9th in the higher elevations, shutting down Trail Ridge Road (the pass that joins the western part of Rocky Mountain National Park to the east and Estes Park), if only for a day. Pre-Winter is the season that this July 29th dumped a couple of inches of slushy snow/hail on the tourists in Grand Lake, who the day before were sunbathing on the beach. Pre-Winter is Grand County’s reminder that no matter how nice it is today, a climactic Armageddon is always – and with utmost certainty - right around the corner. Pre-Winter can last as long as two months, sometimes even stretching into October, offering some of the most beautiful weather to be had anywhere in the world. You’ll have days with highs in the upper- 60’s to low 70’s, with the golden aspens set against a sky so brilliantly blue that it leaves you challenged for adjectives. Just don’t ever plan an outdoor wedding during Pre-winter, as that 70-degree, azure day can turn into Santa Land in a matter of hours.

The next and most dominant of the Grand County seasons is real winter, not to be remotely mistaken with anything that the rest of the country refers to as winter. As I mentioned earlier, this is ‘Kick your ass, freeze your butt, blah, blah, blah winter’. Your typical winter in Grand County generally lasts anywhere from 9 to 14 months. Daytime highs of -10F are common for most of December & January. February is usually a lot colder. There was a night when I went outside to smoke a cigar and the nighttime air being sucked through the business end of the cigar froze up the moisture from my breath in the discharge end of the cigar. I wasn’t out too long that evening. It is literally too cold to snow, as the flakes are so frozen and the air so dry that the snow falls like the finest ash you’ve ever encountered; you can effortlessly sweep a 3-4 inch snowfall from your front walk with a kitchen broom. However, it does accumulate, and by the end of February, you’ll typically have anywhere from 4-8 feet of it piled high on your northern exposure areas, i.e., the back of the house and roof-areas that don’t see the low-slung southern-sky sun for a few months. In fairness, it’s not always below zero in February – occasionally you’ll get a little tropical warm-up, say into the low 20’s, which then brings some moisture that translates into a damp-snow blizzard that limits visibility in a car to the inside front of your windshield. Getting caught in one of these – I have several times – is what made St. Christopher get out of the transportation business.

There are a few plus sides to real winter in Grand County. You have some of the best skiing to be had anywhere in the world. You can also ski in the winter, with some terrific powder and wonderful slopes. And then there’s the skiing! Moguls, side-slipping, stemming, traversing, cliff-hucking – woo baby, I can’t get enough of it. Not really. I tried to ski once, and took my skis off halfway down the bunny slope, never again to attempt a double-reverse traversing cliff-huck. So while the winter in Grand County offers some pretty good skiing, if you don’t ski, you’re pretty much you-know-what for something else to do. I guess one final plus of a Grand County winter for me is that the brutally cold climate is not conducive to the growth of the large, poisonous tarantulas typically found in tropical climates. I thank God every day for that fact, as I’m scared to death of big tarantulas. I’m always thinking to myself, “If I lived in an Amazonian rain forest, I’d be all the time dealing with big, hairy spiders. Here in Grand County, with 9 months of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, that isn’t an issue.”

Real winter is followed by post-winter, also known locally as ‘mud season’. Ahhh, Mud Season; how idyllic is that? Here’s a free slogan for the local Chamber – “Come Celebrate Mud Season in Beautiful Hot Sulphur!” Mud season is always welcomed by the locals, as it is the harbinger of better times ahead. The days are slowly getting longer and steadily getting warmer, the temperatures now starting to crack that 32-degree freeze-line with regularity – at least in the late afternoon, on sunny days. Those dry powdery snowfalls of real winter are replaced by heavy, wet, blinding snowstorms – but they melt quickly, especially when the daytime highs are in the low 40s and the torrential rains help to knock the winter snow accumulations into the swollen streams and rivers. And the end result of this glacial cleansing is, well, mud; on the roads, in the yards, the parks, the trails, the parking lots, the carpets and floors, and especially on Lucy’s’ underbelly and paws. Many of the locals, especially those involved in the seasonal hospitality and food and beverage industries, pack up and head out of town to warmer, sunnier, cleaner climes – that would be anywhere other than Grand County, CO.

The final season, though the shortest of the four, is the reason why 19,000 people put up with the other three seasons to reside in this county. Spr-ummer-fall essentially takes the best aspects of spring, summer and fall and rolls them into one languid, lush and beautiful 6-8 week season. At the onset of Spr-ummer-fall, the river thaws and gushes forth, the mountain meadows become lush with grass, sage and wildflowers, and the days end in a bask of alpenglow. This one-two week season is followed by a mountain summer – warm, dry days and cool starlit nights – where the sky is bluer and the stars are brighter than any you’ve ever seen or could imagine. The afternoon heat is often punctuated by a brief blast from Mother Nature, bringing oft needed moisture and relief to the arid valley. Only occasionally do the storms last into the evening, and even less do they bring summer snow. The final weeks of Spr-ummer-fall bring the golden aspens – a sight that makes the orange and red of Midwestern oaks, maples and hickories pale in comparison. If the color gold can ever look ablaze, it is in these aspens as they rest against the backdrop of the foot hills and peaks of the Rockies. One of the most spectacular sights one can ever behold is seen from the top of Ute Pass, a 20+ mile drive from the Riverside, where the spectacle of the Gore Range and the Blue River Valley is laid out before you in a panorama that has to be witnessed – it can’t be described. It is mountains that look like they were drawn by children, with sheer faces and exaggerated jagged peaks; throw in the golden explosion of the aspens, and you’ll find it hard to get back in your car and leave the view behind.

The four seasons of Grand County are truly a dichotomy – nature at its cruelest and most malevolent at one turn, and glorious and magnanimous at the other. It is as exhilarating to witness the brutality of the winter as it is to revel in the gentleness of summer. But forgive me my abruptness in ending this chapter of life in the mountains; I must now put aside my musings, as it is starting to rain tarantulas.