Weather is a relative thing. Ask a Southern Californian about snow and you very well might get a blank look. Ask a UPer about snow and the look will vary from nostalgic to horrified. Here in the Swirling Epicenter, we get snow every year. Not Michigan snow, but definitely more than San Diego snow. In the seventeen years since I moved here, the most I've seen at one time was in October of 1997 when the weatherman's prediction of 1-2 inches turned into three feet with drifts upwards of six feet. In Upstate New York they call that normal, but this isn't New York or Minnesota; it is somewhere between there and LA. So, the big blizzard of '97...quite a weekend.

I was working as the dispatcher for an asphalt paving company. We had a fleet of trucks for moving all kinds of material around; gravel, rocks, asphalt, etc. Things slow down in the winter so we also had a few trucks set up for plowing snow and sanding roads. We had contracts with several businesses in the area that had large parking lots or company roads inside their complexes. With a forecast of light snow, we started to set up the trucks for sanding operations. It was about four pm, getting dark, wind picking up, and flakes were beginning to fall. I was out in it putting the plows and sanders together until about six. By that time we had our alloted two inches and it looked like a lot more was coming. We called in the stand-by drivers, started sending trucks to the customers that had called early, and headed for home about eight. By then the snow was heavy and horizontal. The news on the radio reported that several of the major streets in town were ice-covered and there were a lot of accidents slowing the flow of traffic. I decided to go home by way of the freeway, figuring that the State plows would clear that first. Not so.

I got to the top of the freeway ramp and joined everyone else heading south who thought this would be better than the surface streets. We crawled along at a stately 10-15 mph in one of the worst snowfalls I had seen in a long time. I reached my exit and barely got to the top of the ramp. There wasn't much traffic. I crept along, struggling to figure out where the road was. At one point I passed a sign on the right that I couldn't make out, but felt it was something I needed to see. I stopped and backed up a little way. This was easy; I was backing down hill, but starting uphill again would not be so easy. The sign said, "Keep Right". I realized that the sign was planted on the median...I was going uphill in the downhill lane. I had to back up quite a bit to get to a break in the median, then tried to coax the Goat into starting uphill again; that was tricky. But we did it. My house is on the corner of a cul-de-sac. My driveway faces the cul-de-sac, not the street. I tried several times to get into the cul-de-sac but the snow was too deep; even backing off and unleashing all the horses that the Goat could muster just got me jammed into the snowbank. So I backed down the street a few yards and charged forward, pushing as far as I could onto my front yard. That was where she stayed.

The State of Colorado called up all the heavy equipment from construction companies all over the state. State of emergency and all that. We spent three days clearing major routes and critical areas, like hospitals and the mayor's house. Our regular customers had to wait until we were released from the emergency. We sent front-end loaders, motor-graders, trucks with plows and sanders, and backhoes all over the county. One loader, a Cat 980, a pretty large loader, was told to go out from town as far as he could on Highway 94. The operator was out by himself, all the worklights blazing on the loader, plowing four to five feet of snow off the highway. He said he got an eerie feeling and turned around to see what was behind him. He said there were about a hundred cows, deer, and antilope following him down the road. Go figure...it was either the lights or getting their bellies out of the snow.

The blizzard lasted about twelve hours and the clean up lasted more than three days. There was lots of story-swapping about the adventures in road-clearing. One of my favorites: we sent a Catepillar 950 loader to clear the private road for a Mr. Ingersoll, an elderly gentleman whose name appears on heavy equipment all over the world...Ingersoll-Rand. He said he was never so glad to see a yellow tractor in his life.

But after all the stories were hashed out and expanded to their maximum capacity, the best story came not from this blizzard but from one that had happened several years before. One of the drivers was put into a big front loader and sent to the Citadel Shopping Mall, one of our biggest customers. The mall security told him where to pile the snow he plowed up and he went to work. If you are not familiar with loaders, I will tell you, they are very powerful. Plowing snow with a loader is no strain on it at all. The driver was new to the world of heavy equipment and was amazed at how easy it was to push the snow around and pile it up in the designated area. When he was done and reported to the security man that he was ready to go, the mall cop asked if he had clipped any of the curb blocks. The driver assured him that he hadn't, everything was smooth as could be. It was, too, until a few days later when the snow started melting and hundreds of curb blocks began to show from under the piles. The driver went by there and said it looked like some giant modern sculpture, curb blocks sticking out every which way. He said that the loader never even slowed down, just sheared them off and piled them up.

I don't work there anymore. I haven't had one of those three-o'clock-in-the-morning-get-the-crews-launched calls in years. But every time it snows I think about all those frozen nights, sometimes preparing equipment, sometimes behind the wheel. I sure am glad I don't have to do that anymore. I like snow a lot more than I used to.