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Thursday, October 26, 2006

10/26/06: Bike Tour-Blizzard, Eh?

Woke up to the snow. Heavy, wet snow. Quite a bit, but not nearly what I expected. The Winter Storm Warning yielded about 6" of snow here, but further south toward Castle Rock and Colorado Springs & Pueblo (the way we were going) received as much as 2 feet!

We chose wisely.

In retrospect, taking 285 would have been a disaster! Conifer got something like 22"! This whole episode has made us think in terms of how to respond if we're faced with this in the middle of nowhere. Also, the Pocketmail may have saved our hides. We'll arrange to have someone keep an eye on the weather if we can't.

Seems elementary, doesn't it?

We've decided to stay here through Friday, to let the snow melt a bit. Temps statewide east of the mountains are to be near 70 Saturday, and the forecast says nothing about ANY kind of rain far into next week. We've decided to take a more easterly route at the beginning, to try to drop in elevation and lessen the chances of more 'blizzards'. I have to say... Coloradans have a strange definition of 'blizzards'. We've seen much worse in Michigan, and people just go about their business! I think it may be a matter of the media getting people worked up so they'll watch their weather 'forecast'!