Tribune, Kansas
AP News - Pilots in a dozen planes flew over parts of Colorado and Kansas on Monday to look for snowbound travelers following a blizzard that dumped nearly 3 feet of snow and piled some of it in drifts 15 feet high. As the aircraft soared above the frozen landscape, utility crews struggled to restore electrical service to tens of thousands of homes and businesses that lost power.
My husband and I spent our first year of marriage(1985-986) teaching in a very small town just 18 miles from this farm. We lived in Towner, Colorado and the nearest place for groceries was Tribune, Kansas. (See map) Local people warned us to be prepared in case of a blizzard (or dust storm), so we always kept extra milk and bread in the freezer. We never experienced any bad weather in the 9 months we lived there; in fact, I really don’t remember it snowing much. Now I have a visual of what those people were trying to prepare us for. Wow!
We did get to experience such a blizzard when we lived in Cloquet, Minnesota just six years later. Thankfully, we lived in town and rather enjoyed the experience of getting snowed in for three days. We were prepared.
I have been praying for those folks out there, and particularly the ranchers who have livestock they can’t get feed to. May the good Lord bless and help them, because they need it!
I don’t think it ever hurts to keep a good stock of non-perishable food on hand, and indeed, my husband thinks I’m a little nutty about it. My mother said she tried never to have less than 6 weeks of groceries on hand in the winter. (We lived in northern Nebraska, and my parents were veterans of the Winter of 1949.)
6 weeks? Yikes! That must have been a bad storm to make her store up that much, but then those were very different times.
It was more than just one storm — it was the entire winter. During January, just January, Nebraska had 70 inches of snow. My parents’ snapshots showed them standing on snowdrifts up to their second story windows. When you live way out in the middle of one of those vast empty spaces on the map of northern/western Nebraska, nobody comes to plow you out — especially in 1949. You are there until you either dig yourself out or the snow melts.