Snow Sunday: Living Without Snow

21 Feb Snow Sunday: Living Without Snow

It’s a been a strange world this winter living without snow. Most directly, no new snow has limited activities such as skiing and Nordic skiing. As Jesse McTigue cleverly illustrated in last week’s Snow Sunday, there can be a kind of depression that sets in when we can’t do those things.

But beyond snow sports, no snow has meant it hasn’t felt like winter. To cities across the U.S. beleaguered by frigid temperatures and feet of snow, this may sound like heaven. Yet to me, no winter just feels wrong. Telluride is a place that belongs in snow.

Dreaming of Powder (Photo Credit: Nathan Frerichs)

While I love summer here, it always feels like an intermission from the real thing. It’s as if all summer, the mountains hold their breath and when the first flakes starts swirling dreamily through the air, everything—the mountains, the sky, the trees—breathes a sigh of relief. The landscape isn’t the only thing that seems happier in winter. Everyone relaxes with the first fall of snow (and if they don’t, they quickly leave town). Snow means frozen ponds and pond hockey. Snow means slow-cooked elk stews and bottles of red wine with friends. Snow means deep, cold evergreen breaths—the kind of breaths that make you feel awake again.

Except this winter, when we haven’t had snow in over two months and temperatures have climbed into the 60’s, I haven’t cooked elk stew with friends. And I haven’t taken those deep evergreen breaths. I haven’t felt like it. Instead, I’ve been running. And sifting through the piles of junk in our house, deciding what to keep and what to pass along. I’ve been grilling and clearing the winter debris from our gardens. In short, I’ve been doing all the things I love to do in May. Except I’ve been doing them in February.

No snow is concerning not only for our happiness right now. It’s also concerning for our happiness this summer. This part of the world loves wildfires like dragons like devouring small children (not sure if that’s true, but running with it). No snow means no fireworks on the Fourth of July. No cheery campfires circled by children jacked up on S’mores. No watering gardens except on the evenings during certain times. And it means that every day, we will be praying for rain harder than we’ve ever prayed for snow because those aforementioned dragons are waiting to blow smoke our way the second the wind shifts.

It will snow again, probably when we least expect it (read April and May). It always comes. Yet, for now, it just feels eerie to look out at the hills and see patches of brown. It’s as if we’ve flashed forward a few months in time without ever feeling our feet touch the ground.

This morning I awoke to snow. It was only a light dusting, the fine crystals coating the streets like sugar, yet it was a suggestion that the world was right, that winter would return, that maybe, just maybe global warming would wait another year or another decade or never come. For now, maybe a dusting is all that we’ll get or maybe, just maybe, the skies will open up and the snow will fall and the world will feel right again.