ode to walden and snow

wally definitely earned his keep in the last two days!  with not having his snow tires on yet, there's no way scott would have been able to get around town in his truck - he said the interstate wasn't really plowed yet when he went up to a meeting in lowry around 10:30am.  honestly, if we didn't have wally, neither of us probably would have made it off of our street - we live on a tiny side street that will never be plowed, and the intersection with the secondary street we live off of just gets so snow and ice packed, erma wouldn't have been able to make it out.  this morning, scott left at the same time as me with the intention that if he got stuck, we would try to rig up a tow so that wally would help haul truck out of the ice.  he managed to get through on his own, but still - it's nice to now that we have an option like that.  (although it might be a more solid option if, you know, we actually had a hitch on the back of wally.)

we measured the snow on the driveway at about 5pm last night, and there was actually 1/2" less than there had been that morning despite the fact that it had been snowing all day.  i think the snow yesterday was a lot heavier and wetter than the snow from wednesday, so it sort of compacted what was underneath - i noticed, too, that along the back wall, the drifts had fallen about 2" by yesterday night from where they were in the morning.  so i'll estimate that we got maybe 17" of snow all told, which really only equals about 1-2" of rain!  isn't that crazy?  it kind of makes sense, though - i had wondered how colorado has so many drought/water issues when we get such ridiculous amounts of snow in the mountains every year, but the 300+" of snow the mountains get equals probably 20-30" of rain - most likely closer to 20" since so much of it is the dry powder.  granted, that is over the entire high country, which is pretty big - colorado has the most land over 10,000 feet in the u.s.  i checked aspen, steamboat, and telluride's annual snowfalls, and they're all over 300" of snow, and the three towns are very spread out.  hmm, although this other site says like 136" of snow annually for aspen, which is pretty different ...  either way, a ridiculous amount of snow doesn't necessarily mean a ridiculous amount of precipitation.