No Matter What We Do, They. Keep.Trying.

The National Weather Service office in Pueblo posted these radar images on Facebook today.

See the oval on the left? That is not rain, it's birds.

No matter what we do. No matter who is running for president. No matter whether the stock market is up or down. No matter how wet or dry the winter was (dry here in the Arkansas River drainage),  they keep trying to live their ancient, ancient lives.

You can do them a solid by turning off as many lights as possible. They don't need your lights. They know the way.

Your Backordered Snowstorm Has Arrived

Dear We Ship Precip Customer:

Your order no. 15042022-16IN, which had been on back order, has now shipped and should have arrived or be arriving shortly.

We deeply regret the delay, but as you know, the availability of many products has been low due to global shipping issues. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

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Temperature: slightly below freezing

Precipitation: 13 inches/33 cm (may increase if your order included our Second-Day Package

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The Wisdom of the Hackberry: Reflections on a Weird Gardening Year

One day this past week our little hackberry tree turned golden. It was alone in that—true, the aspens are turning at higher elevations, but here the lanceleaf cottonwoods, the Gambel oaks, the various berry bushes, are  all still green. 

We got it a few years ago at some nursery in Taos, possibly the now-closed Blossoms in Ranchos de Taos, or possibly Petree, but I think it was Blossoms.

I nearly lost it one year to drought, but it has come back up to where — although the picture does not suggest great height — it is a couple of feet taller than I am. Hackberry is supposed to be fast-growing. That is true in the good years.

"Hackberry," says the University of Nebraska Extension Service, "Celtis occidentalis, is a native tree to the region. It grows up to 60 feet tall and has a spread of 50 feet. It is in the same family as the elm tree, Ulmaceae."

Another site notes that hackberry "can withstand high salt, acid, sand, clay and alkali levels in soils, as well as survive extended flooding and drought." 

"Flooding and drought" summarizes the 2021 growing season. Spring and early summer were soaking. In an article celebrating this year's hay harvest, one of the county weeklies said the core growing area received more than 19 inches (4.75 hands for the horsey set, about one cubit for you Mesopotamians) of rain in the spring in summer. At my place, I saw water running downhill in places where I had never seen water before, not even when big spring snow dumps melted.

"Ah," I thought, "this will recharge the soil moisture, and we will have wildflowers and vegetables and mushrooms and all of it."

Not so fast, hopeful foothills gardener!  

Our "Holderness" (that's its name) clay soil holds water if you apply it slowly, which nature often does not. As my old Soil Conservation Service book on local soils says, 

Holderness "loess and residium that derive from sandstone . . . . the native vegetation is mostly foothills grasses. . . . . Permeability is slow, and the available water capacity is high. . . . runoff is moderate or rapid, and the hazard of erosion is high. Gully erosion is common. This soil is suited to pasture and grazing. (Description updated here.)

M. was at the grocery store two days ago, and someone else was describing her vegetable garden this year as "crappy." I think that happens when you plant late because it's cold and wet — and then the weather goes dry and hotter than average in late summer, making it almost impossible to keep up with watering plants.

As for the local wildflowers, they were not all that spectacular. Maybe they need more recovery time. Up a little higher, about 8,500 feet, I saw amazing flowers in an area that burned in 2016, however, with aspen saplings coming up everywhere.

Mushrooms down here were not. The usual Agaricus campestris never popped (well, there was one I left alone) and the normal Suellus "slippery jacks" never appeared. 

But up in our usual mushroom grounds, the harvest was spectacular, so no complaints.

Instead, this was the Year of Tall Grass. To come up our driveway is to experience driving between banks of grass like grain waiting for the scythe — I say scythe because I mean tall stuff, not like dwarf wheat bred for combine-harvesting.

I let much of the cabin lawn go unmowed (the deer bed down in that high stuff, feeling hidden). It was a tough choice—tall grass is more of a fire hazard, but I wanted all those seeds! It sure beats buying seed, and now the mower can spread them. 

Everywhere, grass thicker than I have ever seen. What Holderness wants, it gets.  It wanted the early summer lambsquarter and amaranth; it did not want beets, and it was sort of indifferent to tomatoes, which are bearing but not heavily.

Meanwhile, the hackberry, in its weather wisdom, is one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring, and now it is the first one to cash in its chips when autumn comes. It knows that abrupt changes from cold to hot and back again are commonplace and always have been, as long as there have been hackberries. As the saying goes, "normal is just a number."

A Blue Bird, but not a Bluebird, Out of Place

Mountain bluebird — not what I was
seeing (Cornell University).

After my experience while mushroom-hunting last August, I am half expecting to bump into the Realm of Faerie again.

So when I looked out the front window and saw an abnormally blue little bird (junco-size) pecking around one of the sunflower seed feeders, I could have just said, "Well, it's some weird pet of the Other Crowd, you know. Better leave it alone."

But no. I flipped through some bird guides, trying to figure this out. It looked like someone took a junco and dunked it in blue hair dye.

I knew it was not a mountain bluebird. They are relatively common once you get out of the thick trees and into some open country, and they are a big ol' thrush, relatively speaking, like an American robin.

Indigo bunting (Cornell University).

I even tried Merlin, Cornell's online bird ID guide (which I have on my phone), and which tried to tell me that it was either a mountain bluebird or a white-breasted nuthatch or something else completely wrong.

So I started asking birder friends (and my patient spouse),  and they all came back with "indigo bunting." Obviously the Merlin app was fooled because they are not supposed to be here, but hey, it's May, when migrants are migrating and birds pop up where not expected.

When you look at the indigo bunting's range map, my house is not in its territory, but you know how it is, sometimes wild animals forget to read their owner's manuals. What was it doing up in the montane pine forest? I don't know. It did not stick around.

'Winter Burn' on Ponderosa Pines

"Needle drop" is normal with ponderosa pines and other conifers. The pine's needles last two or three years before falling off in a normal way and becoming "duff" on the forest floor. Usually the dead needs fall from the interior of the canopy while new growth occurs at the tips of branches.

On this pine, however, and some growing near it, you can see that the dead, yellow needles are at the tip. A recent news release from the Colorado State Forest Service suggests a reason:

A cold snap in October, coupled with last week’s [mid-April 2020] extreme temperature fluctuations, injured ponderosa pines, other pine species and spruce trees in the Douglas and Elbert county areas, including Castle Rock, Franktown, Parker, Elizabeth and Kiowa.

I  don't live in one of those counties, which include the part of the Black Forest area NE of Colorado Springs, called that for its stands of pine trees. But we had the weather: On April 14, a neighbor's weather station recorded a low of 2° F. (-16° C), following a week of warm temperatures.

Damaged pine and spruce trees may appear grizzled and possess white or straw-colored foliage, referred to as “winter burn.” Other symptoms may include the tips of needles appearing rust-colored while the base of the needles remains green.

The tree I photographed is rooted in a small gully, which means it gets a little more moisture, so it has grown taller than the pines around it. On the other hand, that gully is a conduit for cold air rolling down the slopes.

Unfortunately, little can be done for trees that have sustained winter burn damage, according to Meg Halford, a forester in the Colorado State Forest Service’s Franktown Field Office. However, “the buds on these frost-injured trees may have survived, and they may produce new growth this spring,” Halford said. “Don’t count them out just yet.” 

Some others are showing dead needles that might mean more pine beetle kil/fungus infection. We don't lose whole mountainsides of trees, as has happened with the lodgepole pines further north. It's more a question of a few here and a few there. There is not much I can do about that. The standing dead trees mostly become firewood.

Everything Picturesque about the Upland Southwest

Yellow-blossom cholla cactus, dead Gambel oak, one-seed juniper, barbed wire, old sun-baked tires, pile of rusty tin cans. If it can stab you, it will.

And in the air, the overpowering smell of musk mustard, only slightly sweeter than skunk spray. 

Back home, M. was out picking some wild greens to put in our supper. I suggested musk mustard — all the very best foraging blogs recommend it.

"I don't care what the foraging blogs say," she replied. "It makes me nauseous."

So we get lambsquarter instead. 

Musk mustard, Chorispora tenella, a/k/a purple mustard.

What do the foraging blogs say? Things like this:

There are very few greens tasty enough to make an entire salad out of; musk mustard is one of those greens. Lightly dressed with a drizzle of oil & vinegar and a few crumbles of goat cheese…it’s the perfect salad. If you listened to the National Park Service and cattle ranchers, you’d think musk mustard was a noxious weed. And you’d be missing out on an easy-to-identify, plentiful wild edible.

Or  this:

Among the plants I observed and collected on this trip, wild mustards made a strong showing. These are often overlooked or passed over for sexier wild fare, but wild mustards are plentiful and accessible throughout Denver area right now—making them a good choice for a late April, early May foray. 

No quelites wars at our house, though. I picked some prickly lettuce, which is a little bitter on the line of dandelions, but not more than some of the greens sold in stores.

Springtime, Vultures, and Snow

Spring is an iffy business on the Eastern Slope of the Rockies. Dad had one all-purpose adjective for it: "putrid."

There are areas of the Western Slope that have fiercer winters yet almost manage a proper spring. Like right now it is 59° F. in Durango while it is 40° F at my house, and both are at approximately the same elevation: 6500–6600 feet.

Turkey vulture

But there are signs. Driving toward Pueblo on Monday morning, March 30, I saw a turkey vulture eating a roadkill skunk by the highway, while M. spotted one overhead as she was out walking back at home.

Today a letter to the editor in the county weekly proclaimed "Vultures are back." (The message was to watch where you park your vehicle in town.) I like living where vultures are worth a headline.

Monday evening a little rain-and-graupel squall blew through, complete with thunder. The first thunder of the season. With thunder comes lightning — back in April 2011 we had to evacuate in front of a lively little (2500 acres) forest fire that was put out by  . . . a snowstorm.

Maybe Dad was right. Putrid.

So we look for wildflowers — only spring beauty (Claytonia) has shown up yet. M. picked a few early dandelion leaves and put them in a salad largely for what she admitted was symbolic value, but we have to obey the hunter-gather imperative.

I am expecting one or two more snows, in the natural order of things. And hummingbirds.

"The Hatch is on"

The highway goes over this little crest and then turns down and left.
If you don't turn left too, bad things happen.

With a title like that, you probably think this blog post is about fly-fishing. It's not. I wish that it were. To be honest, I have had this flu-like virus since early December. It's not "the" flu with fever and body aches; it was more like fatigue and sore eyes and insomnia and shortness of breath with bronchial wheezing. Since breathing difficulties are listed as a symptom of coronavirus, I was saying that I had coronoavirus before coronavirus was cool, but in fact, it must have been something else.I thought that I had pretty well beaten it, but then it came back for a farewell tour this week.

It has all left me uninterested in x-c skiing, fishing, late-season quail hunting, anything of that sort. Just some hikes close to home, before February's snows made that about impossible. And wood-cutting. Always wood-cutting.

As I prepared for an afternoon of editorial work (editing someone's book proposal), everything electronic started pinging and dinging. "Motorcycle wreck at mile marker such-and-such. Unknown injuries." And  . . . we're off. The ex-chief and one volunteer were leaving the station in one brush truck — a small wildland fire engine; we use them for traffic control too. On the radio, he asked me to bring another, so I was about five minutes behind them, heading up a twisty mountain highway, babying the diesel engine until it fully warmed up.

This happens every warm weekend — clumps of motorcycle riders, from 8 to 20 or so, out for a ride on twisty mountain roads. "The hatch is on," M. and I say to each other when we hear the rolling thunder out on the state highway. Not caddis flies or mayflies or anything like that.

On the way, the dispatcher broke in, saying that the air ambulance had been "stood down." That could mean one of two things: injuries were minor and the county ambulance service had the situation in hand, or, no one needed an ambulance.

Twenty minutes later, I was on-scene, and Ex-chief positioned me to slow down traffic in a spot where oncoming drivers could see me, but I myself could not see down into the accident scene. No problem — I had gone through this year ago, when another rider went over the edge at the exact same spot, and we had to guide the helicopter in to pick up him up.

After a time, he called me up to the scene itself, because it was body-recovery time, and they needed more muscle. We zipped the victim into a body body . . . and then another body bag because that one had ripped because of barbed wire . . . and then six of us (two fire fighters, one deputy, one sheriff's posse member, and the two female EMTs) carried him up the steep rocky slope.

We stood around while the EMT's filled out the appropriate body tags. A mortician from a town twenty-some miles away arrived in an anonymous Ford Flex van, which he opened to reveal a gurney. We loaded the victim, strapped and zipped him in, and he was gone.

As we stood there, more clumps of motorcycle riders went by, slowing down to gawk. Sometimes I think we could carry a sign on the fire engines that we could set up at the scene: "This could be you!" The hatch definitely was on.

Everyone these days describes peak experiences in terms of "It was just like a movie!"

I get it. This was like the History Channel's Vikings series. A big guy (like 300 lbs. big) with a scraggly blond chin beard, he must have laid the bike over on his left side, which tore the foot and ankle nearly off. Then his un-helmeted head collided with a couple of granite boulders, leaving big deep lacerations down to the bone — maybe deeper. All I could think was that he looked like the loser in a Viking ax-fight.

Mountain Bluebird (Cornell Univ.)

Back at the fire house, more motorcycles were still passing, heading back to Colorado Springs or to the Denver-plex. (Our victim was from Aurora, if I heard correctly.)

But two mountain bluebirds zipped past over the concrete apron outside the engine bays, a sign of spring that I could endorse.

Wildflowers in a Scrambled Spring

Penstemon virens, low penstemon — I think.

This spring has been unusually cool and wet. The "wet" means that all of Colorado is now officially out of drought. I kept thinking locally that the soil moisture was still not what it could be—I was not seeing the spring melt trickles in the little draws—but the last May snowstorm produced some, so hurray for that.

The early wildflowers (spring beauties, pasqueflower) were nothing much, but these penstemons came on strong. M. and I were in south central Texas in April when the bluebonnets (which are lupines) were blossoming—the slope behind the house is almost like that.

Clematis hirsutissima, hairy clematis or sugarbowl.

These hairy clematis (I say Clem-atis, you say Cle-mat-is) usually bloom by late May; this year there are just getting going now. Ditto the wallflowers, not pictured.

Rocky Mountain locoweed, Oxytropis sericea. They are blooming in full force too. On the other hand, the apple trees in the neighborhood had a very few blossoms. It was chilly for so long.

Four-nerved daisy or "Perky Sue"

Perky Sue? Isn't that an old rock 'n' roll song? No, that was "Peggy Sue," as first performed by Buddy Holly — video here. (Supposedly its name commemorates this  Texas lady.)
 
Its botanical name is Tetraneuris Ivesiana.  Photographed at Trinidad Lake State Park on the first of June.

The Lone Lilac Abides

I was climbing the steep dirt road up behind the house, following the dog, mind off somewhere (probably volunteer fire department stuff) when I ran into a wall of lilac scent.

There it was — the survivor. A family from down in Rocky Ford used to have a cabin up there — really just a parked camping trailer with an addition. They planted a lilac bush on a southwest-facing slope behind it, and they must have picked just the right variety, in the late 1960s or whenever it was.

They stopped coming much after 1998, when the father died. Eventually the adult children sold us those acres, and one tough lilac bush.

Through drought years, blizzards, and total neglect the lilac prevails. This is one of the good years. Among the scent of sun-warmed ponderosa pine — pungent lilac.

'False Spring' Pasta

We are used to "false spring" along the Eastern Slope of the Rockies.

Maybe now, with the last snow melted, this is the real spring, but I am still calling this dish pasta falsa primavera — with fillaree, lamb's quarters (quelite cenizo), clover, and dandelion, all picked within yards of the house.

Quick, It's Nest Box Time!

American robin (Cornell)

Want to Build the Right Nest Box for Your Area's Birds?

The Cornell University has an interactive guide that will help you download appropriate building plans and place your nest box: Right Bird, Right House.

Want to Monitor Bird Nests for Citizen Science?

You can sign up to monitor a wild bird's nest through Cornell's Nest Watch program.

Participating in NestWatch is easy and just about anyone can do it, although children should always be accompanied by an adult when observing bird nests. Simply follow the directions on our website to become a certified NestWatcher, find a bird nest using our helpful tips, visit the nest every 3-4 days and record what you see, and then report this information on our website. You can also download the NestWatch Mobile App for iOS and Android and record what you see at the nest in real time.

Why It Is All Worthwhile (Besides Science)

The inimitable Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, writes how seeing birds enter her childhood birdhouses provided "a little flush of pride dangerously near possession" and muses,

In Britain, the class system inflects nestboxes as it does everything else. You can buy boxes that resemble scale models of pubs or churches, ones with poems or flowers painted on the front, with tiny glued-on gates and picket fences. These are frowned upon by the gatekeepers of British nature appreciation, who recommend plain wooden ones. The RSPB explicitly warns against using decorative boxes in case their bright colours might attract predators, even though there’s no real evidence for this. Yes, metal boxes are a bad idea because they can overheat nestlings, but a handwritten “home sweet home” isn’t much of an issue when robins can and will nest happily in discarded teapots.

Read the rest of her "Spring Reflection: A Birdhouse Makes a Home."

Spring Flowers &c. Seen While Walking the Dog

Sand lilies, Leucocrinum montanum.

Spring beauty  Claytonis rosea (says the guidebook).

Dropped feather from a Eurasian collared dove, busy breeding already.

Pasque flower, Pulsatilla patens

Three good websites: Wildflowers of Colorado, Eastern Colorado Wildflowers, Southwest Colorado Wildflowers

Angry Birds Are Angry

"If I see him again, I'll kill him," he thinks.

Yesterday two American robins began a day-long battle with their enemies — the birds in the mirror.

"I've got you now! You can't get away!"

One of them is particularly upset about the evil robin inside the passenger-side mirror on my Jeep Liberty.

I think the overcast weather made the windows more mirror-like. Screens are on the inside.

The other one has a bigger challenge. He keeps seeing enemies in the casement (crank-out) living room windows. "Death to you! And to you!"

You try to eat breakfast and there is this frantic shape flapping around outside.

The funny thing is that they do not fight each other — real live opponents.

I assume that this activity is springtime hormone-related and should abate soon. But they go at it from dawn until dusk.
 

What Spring Looks like in 2018

Male back-headed grosbeak
(Cornell Lab of Ornithology).

These things happened today:

1. I heard thunder.

2. A male black-headed grosbeak came to one of the birdfeeders. They breed here, so that's a sign of changing seasons. And they sing like a robin who has had professional training.

3. It rained a little. A whole tenth of an inch. What does it tell you that a tenth made me deliriously happy? Like maybe no Red Flag warnings (high fire danger) for a day or two?

4. Also, I saw a band-tailed pigeon, another summer resident, fondly remembered as playing a part in an odd pigeon-related encounter some years ago.

Black-headed grosbeak range map (Cornell Lab of Ornithology).

Fire Thoughts in Spring

Pasque flowers.

There's a rumble from the state highway down the valley. It is the second warm weekend day in a row, and "the hatch is on," as we say. Everyone in Colorado Springs or Pueblo with a motorcycle wants to ride it into the mountains. Some don't make it back, and then Flight for Life is landing at what I call Motorcycle Death Corner, an almost-hidden downhill switchback that sneaks up on the happy weekend rider.

But on to happier things. We are not on fire, at least not right now. The prairies are, however. Red Flag Warnings in ten states, including our part of Colorado.  Big blazes like the Rhea Fire in Oklahoma, now more than 286,000 acres. Quite a few smaller ones too — southeastern El Paso County and eastern Pueblo County (Colorado) seem to be getting hammered.

At the Wildfire Today blog, Bill Gabbert labels the OK Bar fire in southern New Mexico as an "under the radar" fire.

The fire is being managed by New Mexico State Forestry using a less than full suppression strategy. Fires not being suppressed do not receive the same exposure from the public agencies as conventional blazes, and this one may get even less in the next few days. After it grew by almost 5,000 acres on Friday, the national Situation Report for Saturday described the fire like this:

Extreme fire behavior. Last narrative report unless significant activity occurs.

Just two weeks ago I was on an Amtrak train chugging through the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. For one thing, there was more snow on the ground than around my house! (It had all melted six days later, on the return trip.)

Since you are usually seated opposite strangers in the dining car, you have these conversations about topics such as train travel or the weather or where you live as compared to where they live and the natural hazards associated with each place.

It's true, people in the East just don't "get" wildfire, or the community PTSD that sets in after one after another after another have come knocking at your door. That's OK, I don't "get" hurricanes.  (Tornadoes, yes.)

I look at our the window at the leafless, grey Eastern deciduous forests passing by and think, "If it's true that the Indians used to burn these woods agriculture or attracting big game, how they manage to do it? Wait for the perfect day in September? Because they always seem too moist."

Why Didn't the Hummingbirds Die in the Snow?

"I'm not dead yet!" (Cornell University).

It snowed here two nights ago. It snowed a lot. We had at least eighteen inches — fifty centimeters for those you who like cute little centimeters — or as I prefer to say, "a cubit and little more."

Yesterday the temperatures got barely above the freezing point, but today was warmer, and with the southern Colorado sun beating down, the snow is fast retreating.

But yesterday, when it was still cloudy and cold, a resident posted to one of the county's Facebook pages (usually devoted to photos of  sunset-over-the-mountains-from-the-deck-of-our-new-home), a photo of a hummingbird at a sugar-water feeder with a question: Why was the hummingbird just sitting there and not moving? Was something wrong with it?

I think that she had a great opportunity to observe the topor of the broad-tailed hummingbird.

The Cornell ornithology lab's site says of them, "To survive the cold nights in their high-elevation habitats, Broad-tailed Hummingbirds can enter torpor, slowing their heart rate, and dropping their body temperature."

Speaking of hummingbirds in general, here is more on torpor:

Besides being among the smallest of all warm-blooded animals, hummingbirds also lack the insulating downy feathers that are typical for many other bird species. Due to their combined characteristics of small body size and lack of insulation, hummingbirds rapidly lose body heat to their surroundings. Even sleeping hummingbirds have huge metabolic demands that must be met simply to survive the night when they cannot forage. To meet this energetic challenge, hummingbirds save enough energy to survive cold nights by lowering their internal thermostat at night, becoming hypothermic. This reduced physiological state is an evolutionary adaptation that is referred to as torpor.

Torpor is a type of deep sleep where an animal lowers its metabolic rate by as much as 95%. By doing so, a torpid hummingbird consumes up to 50 times less energy when torpid than when awake. This lowered metabolic rate also causes a cooled body temperature. A hummingbird’s night time body temperature is maintained at a hypothermic threshold that is barely sufficient to maintain life. This threshold is known as their set point and it is far below the normal daytime body temperature of 104°F or 40°C recorded for other similarly-sized birds.

And there is this advice:

When hummingbirds sleep and are in the Torpor state, they have been known to hang upside-down. If you find a hummingbird that is hanging upside-down and they appear to be dead, it is actually more likely that they are just asleep. They will probably not even respond if you touched them. If at all possible, leave them alone and they will wake up when they get warmer. 

The male broad-tails usually arrive during the first two weeks of April — this year it was April 7th. I always expect one snowstorm after this arrival, and this year (so far) there have been three. Obviously, the reproductive advantage of showing up early to claim a good territory must outweigh the chance of becoming a hummingbird-sicle. And torpor is how they do it.

Today the resident male (they are all named Chico) was back at the sugar-water feeder.

Geoffrey Chaucer Understood Our Weather—If You Change One Word

When that aprill with his blizzards soote
the droghte of marche hath percèd to the roote,
Than dogges go they forth to play,
And what they thinke, Ich ken ne say.

What Keeps Me Awake at Night

How to lay sandbags: the right way, the wrong way, and the Army Corps of Engineers way.

The future seems to have two probable paths.

1.  A dry winter thus far here in the foothills (the high mountains have lots of snow) means extremely high fire danger this spring and summer. Despite Nature's and humans' best efforts, we have not yet burned all the trees around here.

2. Some typical spring snows and rains break the winter drought but also create debris flows and flooding coming off last October's 18,400-acre burn scar, much of it coming past my area and down into town. (Not as big as 2013's floods up north, but potentially devastating on a two-county scale.)

My house is well above any potential flood short of the "End of the Ice Age" melt, but if both of two bridges were slammed by floating logs or otherwise knocked out, I would be back in the foot-travel and dog-travois era. 

A team from the Army Corps of Engineers Albuquerque district office has been here. They are quite excited about studying the burn scar's flood potential from hydrological and other perspectives, but that is all they can do for us short of a federal disaster declaration, which has not happened yet. (A few body bags would speed up the process, one suggested.)

The flood potential may last for years. That's what they want to study. Yay science!

They did conduct sandbag training today, however. I feel so much better. A neighbor and I laid the first few bags today to protect our shared well house, which sits closer to the creek.

All joking aside, isn't it better to do something and also worry instead of just worrying by itself?

Drought Monitor, April 28, 2016

Here is the drought picture as of yesterday, which does not show the current storm in eastern Colorado and along the Eastern Slope of the southern Rockies. Wet snow has been falling at my house in the morning of the 28th and is now beginning to stick, eight to ten inches so far, as the temperature hangs just above the freezing point.

Visit this page for broad-brush temperature and precipitation forecasts for the next two weeks.