Snow After All

 Oh how I love to be wrong…sometimes, anyway. It’s great to be thick skinned, as in, not thin skinned, like it’s OK to admit you might be wrong The confession starts in a minute. Couple of weeks ago I did a story titled “No Snow in Idaho’s Mountains and in my defense, I didn’t just make up a bunch of apocalyptic facts. The Water Research people told me that we were low on snow in the mountains and that means bad things for this year’s crops.

 Don’t we love Idaho. Mother Nature seems to as well. In the last few days we’ve received a blessing in the form of snow which turns into snowpack which turns into spring and summer water…you know the drill. But there’s also a system in place. Here’s Tony Olenichak, with the Department of Water Resources. “We’ve built these reservoirs for years when we’ve had plentiful water more water, more snow melt than we need for irrigation, we can store that and hold it over for the next year in case we have a short supply. So we’re going to be very dependent on that storage that we have in the reservoirs if it turns out we only have a 50% snowpack at the end of the snow accumulation season in April.”

 But getting back to the original point, recent snows might be giving us just the blessing that we all ask for in the winter. Isn’t it funny. In the ag world we’re praying for snow but so are the skiers, snowboarders and snowmobilers. There’s an interesting blend.