Let it Snow!!!
As many of you know it has been really really really cold here. It still amazes me that the temps get down to -10 and sometimes even -30 almost every night. What may be more amazing is that everyone here acts like that is no big deal. They often explain that it is a "dry" cold which I guess is true, and often we do have sunshine, which does help..but the sun has to be shining!!..... anyway I look at it is still pretty stinking cold!!! But I think we are gradually g
etting used to it.
One thing that has been quite unusual here this year is the amount of snow that we have been getting along with the cold. I don't think we have seen the ground here since around thanksgiving. Tuesday we got a pretty good dumping again, we were all late for work that day since we literally had to dig out the vehicles. There was enough snow that the city brought in heavy equipment (front end loaders and giant "snowblowers" as seen in the pic) to load the snow into dump trucks and take out of town because there wasn't anywhere to put it all.
My supervisor Mike tracks snow pack levels in the San Juan Mountains. The Rio Grande starts near the Continental Divide in the San Juans. Snowpacks are very important and closely monitored here in the valley, and actually most of the west, as majority of the precipitation that is received over the year is in the form of winter snow in the mountains. Mike showed me a interesting stat, so far we are at 178% of a average snow pack for this time of the year!! Basically if that keeps up it will be the largest snowpack on record so this may be a very wet spring/summer. Also I just checked the Wolf Creek Ski Resort ski report and it says they have received 432 inches of snow total this winter so far (Thats 36 feet if you don't have a calculator handy)!!! We are going to be heading there on Sunday for Local Appreciation Days so we will let every know what it is like to ski with that much snow!
Work Work Work
Erin has been doing great with things at La Puente, they really like her over there and have been keeping her busy in the office, with the enterprises, and now at PALS. The teacher in her seems to be really enjoying working the the kids at the PALS program.
I thought I would share a little of what I have been doing with the RGHRP. Mostly I have been working on a monitoring program for stream bank stabilzation projects that we helped fund and organizing data that we collected for that monitoring program in the fall. Since I have been in the office quite a bit lately I also created webpages for both the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District (www.slvwcd.org) and the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project (www.riograndeheadwaters.org). Feel free to check them out, they go into a more detail about what I "do" here. They still need a little fine tuning, and we may add a few more items but are pretty much up and running.
Well thats about all for my two cents now, as always we hope things are going well with everybody and don't hesitate to send us an email or give us a call to let us know how you are doing.
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