A few days ago, as I was looking over the 10-day forecast, it occurred to me that the weather man (or woman) quite possibly has the most secure job on the planet. Where else can you get paid to repeatedly regurgitate oxymoronic descriptors based on computer generated “models” and almost always have your bases covered??? Is it partly cloudy or is it partly sunny? Chance of rain/snow… well, which is it? What constitutes a “calm wind”? Fifty percent chance of precip… that’s a safe bet.
All in good fun as I’m not here to bash our meteorologist friends, especially in light of the recent return of winter. Although, I have to say, after a quick-hit road trip with the crew down to Moab for some sun-soaked, red rock, desert mountain biking, I think I was ready to be done with winter.
One thing that we can all agree on, is that the winter of ’21-’22 has been a strange one. Remember that huge storm in October? And then pretty much nothing until New Years when it dumped… followed by nada for close to two months. Yes, we’ve had below average snowfall, ridiculously long stretches of high pressure and massive temperature swings. We even had our traditional January thaw, only it occurred for nearly the entire month of February, culminating last week.
And now here we are, in early March, on a weather roller-coaster ride. Just last week the temps spiked into the upper 50’s with a full-on meltdown underway, that created pond-skim-worthy bodies of standing water and actively flowing rivulets where Nordic track had lived just days before. We were ready to throw in the towel. One week later and we’re back in the 20’s with a healthy dose of fresh snow and more on the way. Thanks a lot weather people!
I’d like to throw a big shout out to our grooming team – Chase, Alec, Jonathan and all-star guest groomer, Todd Henneman. Despite being handed a lemon of a winter, the MTF crew somehow managed to squeeze out some tasty, snow-spiked lemonade for over three months and counting. We made the best it, doing a lot with a little, as did all of you powder hounds and winter trail enthusiasts. Despite the lackluster winter, there were some good turns to be had up on the mountain and smiles for miles (and kilometers) out on our local singletrack and Nordic.
Be sure to thank your local groomers (and meteorologists) for the good stuff, and have a great one out there!
Rick, MTF Trails Manager
