My plan over Labor Day weekend was to buckle down and use the three-day weekend’s predicted nice weather to build some shelves from scratch. They are desperately needed to house my husband’s growing miniature painting hobby. I’ve had the plans drawn up for months, but was never able to put aside enough time to get everything done – because if I don’t do it all in one go, the project will just languish. Labor Day was my chance. I could hear the sound of my brand new, never-been-used power saw screaming its battle cry against the forces of wood and glue as I sat down in my home office to work Friday morning.
I looked at the To Do List for the day. My boss wanted me to learn a new watershed modeling program, so I spent the morning reading through their manuals and help notes to get an idea of the type and level of data I would need when using it. At 2 p.m. Space Bell cut through my work music, signaling the complete and utter destruction of my weekend plans. My boss needed a complete, working model in the new program by Monday morning. I have a good relationship with my boss (we’re a small team) and I knew he wouldn’t ask if he didn’t truly need it. In the past, he’d joked about “ruining my weekend” or “ruining my April,” but this was the first time I’d ever actually had plans seriously derailed, and I let him know it before settling down for a marathon weekend amid the figurative rubble of my shelves.
As I figured out how to construct slopes and watersheds in virtual space, something not made entirely clear in the manuals despite the intended purpose of the program (scientists are sometimes researchers first, writers second), I would occasionally glance out my window at the sunny, warm outdoors, watching the trees sway languidly in a light breeze. Then I’d lower the blinds because the sunlight made it hard to see some of the details on my monitor. As I dug through soil reports, land use options, and climate conditions I walked a fine line between eating to stimulate my brain and stress eating. Maybe the line wasn’t as fine as I’d like to believe, since I was eating mostly Starbursts and M&Ms, but I was drinking lots of water at least. As I coalesced 18 hillslopes and 8 channel segments into a broad caricature of a watershed, I learned that the program was last updated 8 years ago and I had a limited number of actions I could do per session before I would have to save, close, and reopen the program. Otherwise, the simulations would gradually run slower and slower. By Monday morning I was able to run the final simulation and write up an 18-page report detailing all the decisions and assumptions then went into the simulation, reporting the raw results, and analyzing them. At my boss’s request, I ran additional simulations, and while he was on a conference call conducted a sensitivity analysis where I zeroed in on a threshold and graphed it to show exactly where conditions went from “okay” to “definitely not okay.” I added 15 pages to the initial report, talked to my boss, and was finally done at 1:30 p.m., successful and exhausted.
As one may expect, I didn’t feel like cooking that night, so my husband and I drove to the next town over to pick up sushi from the local Japanese restaurant. My friend, who’d also been working like a demon over the weekend for completely unrelated reasons, called it celebration sushi. Driving back on the interstate, I saw a pair of warnings on the digital message board that I felt summed up the state of Wyoming in a humorous manner. The first warning said, “High Fire Risk.” The second read, “Blowing snow 9 p.m. to Tuesday 11 p.m.” We both chuckled, knowing full well both warnings were serious (Wyoming doesn’t issue superfluous warnings), and continued on our way home in 80°F-degree weather.
I spent a relieved evening with my husband watching YouTube. About 9 p.m., the wind started picking up. Wind in Wyoming is about as common as a current in the ocean, and we knew a storm was coming, so we didn’t give it much mind. When the building shook and it sounded like a roller coaster had decided to place a track directly on the back side of our house, we were moderately impressed, turned the heat on, and went to bed thankful for warm homes and blankets.
About 6:30 a.m. I got up for an early morning visit to the bathroom. As I groggily stumbled down the hall I noted the continued roaring of the wind and shaking of the house while bitterly cursing my weakling of a bladder for forcing my out of my toasty warm bed. In the dark bathroom I accidentally flipped the switch for the fan rather than the light. The fan didn’t turn on and I spent about five seconds staring at the ceiling processing the event. I decided the wind had probably done something to it and made a mental note to contact the maintenance guy when the blizzard was over as I flipped the light switch. It didn’t turn on either. Neither did the hall light when I checked. Still at the mercy of my bladder, I emptied it then returned to the bedroom and my phone, now completely awake.
We learned that nearly half of our 12,000 person town had lost power. When I looked out the living room window, I knew why. The glass and the screen were almost completely caked in ice. There was one small hole big enough for me to take a picture through. The digital message board hadn’t lied. There was indeed blowing snow. The issue was that there was also ice, and, it being the very beginning of September, the trees had been in full leaf. Branches were down everywhere and had taken power lines with them. (The city ended up turning the local rodeo grounds into a mass drop off location for downed branches. Last time I drove by the pile was about 10 feet high, 50 feet long, and growing.)
My room thermometer (battery-powered) indicated 64°F in the living room. I gathered blankets, sweaters, and any food that didn’t require electricity to eat (a limited selection). I also gathered up all 7 teeny tiny candles we had lying around since the power company didn’t know when they’d be able to get everything back up. I didn’t blame them – the wind was still imitating a roller coaster. We settled on the couch under a heap of blankets and spent the morning reading (me) or playing video games on handhelds that still had a charge (my husband).
We were lucky. The power came back on for us at 11 a.m. The lowest the temperature got in our house was 61°F (it was much colder outside). Our friends on the other side of town weren’t so lucky. We live in a townhouse complex near the edge of town. We’re the only non-free-standing dwellings in the area. The rest are large single-family dwellings, many with multiple vehicles and RVs out front. We suspect this is why we got power so quickly while our friends, a few blocks west of downtown, had to wait two days to get power back.
I’m originally from the Midwest. I’m used to blizzards like this dropping 5-6 inches of snow or more at a time, but Wyoming doesn’t work like that. This blizzard dumped maybe 2 inches of snow and enough ice to inconvenience half of town. I’ve read and been told that snow doesn’t fall in Wyoming, it wears out, and I find this to be accurate. Once snow reaches the ground it is picked back up by the wind. We had some modest drifts out our back door, but the showoff of the blizzard was the ice.
We broke the seal and opened the doors soon after the power came back so my husband could clean off our stoops. The wind had finally settled down and we wanted to get on top of that situation in case there was a round two. Ice had built up in the front and back. At the front it was strong enough to leave a mold of our deadbolt clinging to the door frame. At the back, a sheet of windswept ice clung to the door, along with a small ring of ice and snow hanging onto the frame. Three days after the blizzard, outdoor temperatures were back in the 70s, and the 10-day forecast showed highs between 70°F and 80°F. All the snow was more or less melted a week later.
The ice built up around our front door. 
The ice mold of the deadbolt on our front door. 
The ice that clung to our back door. 
The ice ring that hung around our back door frame. 
The small snow drifts that piled up behind our house. 
Snow and ice adhering to the wall of the house next door.
Due to constant traveling for work before COVID hit and convenient and coincidental timing, I missed every major blizzard last winter. This was my first real taste of what a blizzard can be in the high elevation deserts of the Rocky Mountains, but it was just a small blizzard. There will be more, and I will likely get to experience all of them this year. The major realization this experience brought to light is that I don’t appreciate how much I need electricity to do simple things like boil water. Not much I can do about that. The major lesson I’m taking away is twofold. First, we need a camp stove that is bigger and more capable than the dinky backpacking one we currently have. Second, once we have that bigger camp stove it needs to be stored not in our outdoor storage shed, but in our home where we can reach it by walking upstairs to a closet rather than braving the cold, wind, and ice . We didn’t have to resort to the camp stove since our power came back so quickly, but it’s something to keep in mind for next time. That, and maybe more/bigger candles.
Despite my complaining about work and lost free time, I was proud of what I managed to accomplish in such a short time frame. I am also thankful to have a job at all right now. The blizzard added excitement and rest to a weekend that had offered neither. Excitement because it was a drastic change from the (happy) monotony of warm summer days. Rest, because I was given a whole extra day to lie on the couch with my husband, reading and napping. I suppose Labor Day weekend could have warmer, or more fun, or more relaxing, but I’ll take what I can get. I still haven’t built those shelves though.
Staring Out A Window 