"I was cruising down the face" of the Big Mountain ski resort, Madison said, "when I hit this sort of puddle. One ski just stopped."
Physics took over, and Madison pitched forward.
Skiers who usually brag about "face shots" (those moments when deep powder spills over their heads) are now talking up "pond shots" (those moments when they skim across meltwater puddles and the spray is blinding).
The mountain, like Madison's hip, looks battered, its lower half bruised by big brown patches, just turning to green. In fact, the entire state looks beaten on the latest national Drought Monitor map, wholly discolored with the reds and browns indicating "severe" and "extreme" drought conditions. There's even a couple of patches of purple, where the drought is rated "exceptional."
But the colors - whether on man, mountain or map - are but one way to take measure of the unprecedented drought that has parched much of Montana. Another way is to tally the numbers, which is exactly what meteorologist Bob Nester has been doing from the Missoula offices of the National Weather Service.
Last month, high temperatures in Kalispell averaged about 42 degrees, making it the warmest February on record.
Precipitation was just 0.03 inches, making it the driest February on record. Driest in Eureka and Sula, too.
Snowpack in the Flathead is at a record low, the melt about two months ahead of schedule. At Many Glacier, where the lowest snow depth ever measured in late February was about 8 inches, a scant 3 inches cover the ground.
It's been five full months since either Missoula or Kalispell saw average precipitation, creating what Roy Kaiser has called a "potentially serious problem."
Kaiser watches water from his Bozeman office, working for the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
His agency pegs statewide snowpack at roughly half the historic average, considerably less than half west of the Continental Divide.
The amount of water in the mountains - the "snow water content" - is at record lows in the Flathead basin, the Teton-Marias basin, the St. Mary, the Bear Paws, and in both the Upper Lower Clark Fork basins. In all, some 25 river basins now hold less than half of what they normally should.
Kaiser has called the water packed away in mountain snows "our money in the bank," the account from which we draw all summer to keep streams streaming. But now there's no savings. Even if it started raining tomorrow and kept up at an average pace right through spring, summer streamflows would still be lucky to hit 50 percent.
To fill the rivers, Montana skies would have to dump about 200 percent of average precipitation for the next several months, and no one expects that to happen.
In fact, if recent trends continue, there's more warm and dry on the way.
According to an article in the February 2003 issue of BioScience, the 1990s were "clearly the warmest decade on record: Nine of the hottest years of the climate record dating back to the last century all occurred in the 1990s."
The hottest year in a century was 1998. The second hottest was 2002. The third hottest, 2003.
That article was authored by Dan Fagre, a glaciologist unraveling the impacts of climate change from his offices in Glacier National Park
In northern Alaska, he wrote, soil temperature near Fairbanks has increased 3 degrees in 40 years, and permafrost is melting. In Arizona and New Mexico, millions of acres, whole forests of pinyon and ponderosa pine, are dying of thirst after living there more than 10,000 years.
So it is not, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a trend measured only in seasons, or even decades. Data from the IPCC show these latest are not only the hottest years in a century, but also the hottest in a millennia. By measuring tree rings, glacial ice layers and growth patterns in coral, scientists have concluded that global temperature is higher now than it has been in 1,000 years.
Which explains why Glacier National Park, home to 150 glaciers in 1850, now has about two dozen. The 100 square kilometers of ice measured among the park's peaks a century ago have melted to fewer than 19.
Of course, things can always turn around quickly in the short-term. Long-range trends notwithstanding, one month's drought does not preclude another month's deluge.
Just look at February 1993, which was, until this year, the driest February on record in Glacier Park. But it was quickly followed by the "summer that wasn't," the wettest tourist season ever in Glacier. The quick switch proved, among other things, that despite all the hand-wringing Montana's wildfire season is largely determined by summer rain, not winter snows, a fact foresters have known for years.
And most Montanans can still remember last September, when the western part of the state was soaked in record rains. Had those rains come as snow, they would have dumped tens of feet.
But, of course, they didn't.
And that, given recent history, was perhaps not surprising.
According to Nester, five of Kalispell's six driest winters have come in the past eight years. This winter, Kalispell saw more consecutive days without snow than had ever been recorded, he said.
The culprit, Nester said, is a split jet stream. A big pool of warmer-than-usual water, parked in the Pacific near the equator, has spawned convection that helped form a big ridge of high pressure over the Pacific Northwest.
That ridge is like a big boulder plopped into a river, forcing water to go around it. This winter, the jet stream barreled eastward, laden with moisture, and hit the boulder, splitting to the north and south as it poured around, but not through, Montana.
California and British Columbia were swamped with storms, but "Montana was high and dry," he said.
That, Nester said, explains this winter. But what about the fact that five of Kalispell's six driest winters came in the past eight years? What about the bigger trends?
"There's a lot of people working on an answer to that," he said. "It's a good question. That's what all the climate change research is all about."
And while scientists work on climate change, Mother Nature is working on weather change. That big pool of warm equatorial water is slowly sloughing off toward Indonesia, and Nester says that means Montana's high pressure boulder will finally budge. Temperatures should drop next week, and some moisture might come.
"But it won't be a lot," he warned. "To be honest, it's the middle of March. There's not much snow season left up there."
April and May are usually pretty wet, he said, "and we might get some short-term relief in the spring. But I don't think the long-term looks very promising. I mean, we're so far behind, and how much precipitation can we realistically expect?"
Perhaps, if we're lucky, just enough to reverse a bit of the bruising ski resorts have been taking, enough to cover the growing greenery up high.
But probably not enough to turn the contusions on that Drought Monitor map white again, certainly not enough to replace pond shots with face shots.
"We're way past hoping for big powder days," Madison said. "We're just enjoying the sun and the spring skiing. Too bad it's not spring."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
Drought updates
For a look at drought conditions in Montana and around the nation, log on to www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov. Get information about Montana's current snowpack and projected streamflows at www.mt.nrcs.usda.gov. Regional drought conditions and forecasts for the nation are available at www.drought.unl.edu/dm/index.html.
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