Weeks of high pressure and a slowly rehabbing meniscus havegot me to thinking on a few things, which is usuallya dangerous proposition.

We live beyond - as the author and historian Wallace Stegnerdescribed - the 100th meridian in North America, a rough approximation of the dividing line between thoselands which require irrigation...and those that don't. Any prospective student of the arid West will know of the one armed major pushing off from Green River Wyoming in 1869 and will soon have a bookshelf full of books like Reisner's Cadillac Desert andStegner's Beyond the 100th Meridian, or any number of Craig Childs's current books....and soon be able to relay such stories likewhen the writer John McPhee invited the environmentalist David Brower and arguably the most powerful man beyond the 100thmeridian Floyd Dominy (Dominy being the head of the Bureau of Reclamation - responsible for dam building across the West) down the Grand Canyon. (Brower was said to have walked around many of the rapids...perhaps feeling more comfortable in a mountain environment instead.) Below l-r (Dominy, Brower, Powell)

But it all comes back to water - rain, snowfall...precipitation.

Takea quick lookbelowat current data from the snotel weather stations across the states - (provided by Colorado Basin River Forecast Center - co-located with us at the National Weather Service).

You'll see a fairly sharp gradient running north to south, following the pattern from last year. Last season, the dividing line ran through Ogden with theLogan area mountains ending up with 120% of average; theWasatch Range, Uintas and central Utah ended 70-80% of average;southern Utah had 20-40% of average. Perhaps a follow-up to Stegner's book might be Below the 41st Parallel.

The Alta Guard Station has been keeping records on snowfall since the 1944-1945 winter...and last year we finished up the season below 400" for the year. It was the 3rdyear in a row with November - April snow amounts less than 400"...the last time we suffered such ignominy was thethree winters from 58/59-60/61. Our running average is just over 500".