It’s a development that skiers will greet with cheers, and hospital emergency room staff will immediately regret: The first major storm of the season is upon La Plata County.
As of Thursday night, the National Weather Service instated a Winter Storm Warning for all Southwest Colorado, placed it on Avalanche Watch and issued a Hazardous Weather Outlook describing potentially heinous driving conditions.
By Monday morning, many parts of the region could be inundated by as much as 3 feet of snow, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.
Nancy Shanks, CDOT’s spokeswoman for the Western Slope, said Thursday night that U.S. Highway 550 was already seeing intensified snowfall.
She said they were expecting 27 more inches of snow to fall by tonight, “on top of whatever they got today.”
If weather predictions hold true, U.S. Highway 160 will be similarly besieged.
Shanks said Wolf Creek Pass saw a foot of snow Thursday, and CDOT anticipated it would get an additional 36 inches by Sunday.
The storm may have claimed it’s first fatality Thursday.
Colorado State Patrol confirmed that at least one motorist died in an accident involving two vehicles and at least three people at Wolf Creek Pass in the afternoon.
State Trooper Josh Lewis said one of injured had been taken to Mercy Regional Medical Center and the other to Pagosa Mountain Clinic.
CSP was still investigating the cause of the crash.
At the time of the crash, the roads were reported as “wet,” Shanks said.
The pass was closed for several hours Thursday evening.
With winter’s approach, it’s imperative that drivers take basic precautions, Shanks said. “This is the time to put on your snow tires, put on your chains.”
Going forward, road safety won’t simply be a question of the right tires, nor four-wheel drive, which won’t help in a skid.
“What our plow drivers do see, every storm, is that motorists are simply driving too fast for the conditions,” Shanks said. “Speed limits are the suggested maximum. But we certainly don’t have to go those speed limits, and we shouldn’t be in winter weather.”
Drivers should beware: Guardrails are lacking on many treacherous mountain passes, and while the posted speed limit on several passes is 25 mph, drivers should approach them at 10 mph or slower in cold weather.
But passes aren’t the only peril. Shanks said in frigid temperatures, bridges are always icier than roads.
Finally, she said, frosty conditions make the “2-second” rule everyone learns in drivers’ education courses about the optimal distance between cars dangerously irrelevant.
“You need to expand that when there’s snow and ice on the road. Just drive more slowly, and you’ll get there safely,” she said.
The National Weather Service in Grand Junction predicts the San Juan Mountains will get at least 2 feet of snow over the weekend. It’s less clear how much downtown Durango will see.
Dennis Phillips, with the weather service, said it depended on two weather systems.
On Thursday afternoon, he said a “really slow system moving out of California” is tracking to cover Southwest Colorado during the weekend.
But he said it was difficult to predict the temperatures and snowfall Durango will see over the weekend because another Arctic front also threatens to descend this weekend.
“It’s stuck up in Northwestern Colorado right now, but it will determine how much of that cold air comes in,” he said
If the Arctic front does travel south to the San Juan Mountains, he said temperatures would likely plummet.
If not, he said Durango would likely see high temperatures on in the mid- and upper-30s today, Saturday and Sunday.
While the National Weather Service expects the San Juans to be inundated with snow, Durango will see a lot less.
“The tricky part is that we still think some snow is going to fall there in Durango. There’s a Winter Storm Warning starting Thursday night around midnight, through Friday. It could be significant,” he said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
