Ice Cold Temperatures Begin to Fade Along with the Snow

Stephen Jiron
The Paw Print

We’ve all been there, the alarm sounds and as we pry ourselves from our beds to start our days there is one thing undoubtedly lingering on our minds: the subzero temperatures that await us outside our doors to prey on us and our transportation as we go on our way to work or class or wherever our morning escapades take us.
It’s almost enough to make you ditch class or call in sick to work until we hit our spring thaw.  Just last week our Alamosa was the coldest in the contiguous U.S. at 1, which isn’t a surprise to anybody who has lived here longer than a year.
Last year we held that same title in the dead of a cold spell pushing numbers below thirty. Don’t count on that to change anytime soon. It’s all in the valley’s make-up. Our little valley sits pretty high; Alamosa registers at just over seven thousand feet above sea level, and all that cold air from the mountains has nowhere to go but to pool in our little bowl.  So when the snow falls, that cold sticks and it’s a cyclical reaction.
The snow keeps things cold, and the cold keeps the snow around. Thus Alamosa gets put into the deep freeze, which is about where we are now. This is usually only broken by one thing: when we get rotated closer to the sun.
As you can imagine it makes things hard for the tourism department and all the small business owners (It is hard to sell to people that aren’t there). The people who have lived here all their lives aren’t any tougher than anyone else when it comes to our little slice of the Artic, in most cases we just don’t know any better.
We just don’t know that when it comes to winter, below zero temperatures aren’t the norm. But if you’ve been around town you may have noticed that the thaw is beginning and all that snow is beginning to recede.  We are on the very cusp of spring and if the meteorologists believe Spring will be here sooner rather than later.
A cursory glance at the month would show that we have hit a warming trend, not only here but in all of North America. The simple answer is we’re no longer being bullied by the Polar Vortex. So don’t retire the heavy coat for the summer just yet.
However it would be perfectly acceptable to begin making your spring and dare I say summer plans.