Snowed in

In 1993, I spent eight days in my house on the crest of Beaucatcher Mountain, blanketed in snow drifts that obscured mailboxes, minivans, and anyone under six feet who dared to venture into them. Equipped as we were with three woodstoves and enough instant oatmeal to last a minor apocalyptic event, the blizzard of ’93 is well remembered as a pretty enjoyable event by all the inhabitants of that lonely corner of mountain.

With the exception of, perhaps, our dog, who we didn’t really consider might not fully appreciate being dropped onto a snowdrift and watching walls of snow rise up around her tiny schnauzer body.

But that particular storm went down in the annals of history in Western North Carolina; for years after you could still spot the odd ‘I survived the Blizzard of ‘93’ T-shirts on Goodwill racks. It remains a reference point for snow in the region, and stands unsurpassed at the top of the National Weather Service’s official snowstorm rankings with a whopping 18.2 inches between March 12 and March 14. Only one other snowfall outpaces it, the unofficially measured 26 inches dropped in 1886. That was winter so notoriously harsh across the country that it actually permanently changed cattle ranching practice in the west, along with birthing a spate of cheerless paintings featuring skinny, frostbitten cows.

In the Smokies, our relationship with deep snow has been much more occasional since pioneer times. Since 2000, Western North Carolina has averaged 12.98 inches of snow a year, and even that really isn’t a fair estimate. The nearly 60 inches dumped between 2009 and 2011 sort of pads the numbers for the preceding decade, where most years saw cumulative snowfall cracking the single digits. Eastern Tennessee isn’t far off, their official average snowfall according to the NWS stands at 13.3 inches.

Unlike our northern and western brethren, Appalachians can’t really claim significant snow as an integral part of our life. But unlike say, Buffalo or Dayton, while snow might come often, its effects can be mighty. Should a snow drift blow you from the road in South Dakota, you may find yourself keeping company with cattle for a while. But slide from a snowy pass in the mountains, you could find yourself parting company with solid ground altogether. That’s if you can make it out of your house and onto the road at all. Or up the road and back into your house.

When it comes to weather, altitude doesn’t just affect attitude. It affects everything. For any child raised in the mountains, the phrase, “buses will not run on icy roads” is a staple of winter. Winter weather waivers—passes from the state to allow schools with a history of snow days to start earlier than everyone else—have been granted to a number of mountainous districts like Graham, Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Swain, and Cherokee counties. Perhaps we don’t get as much snow as Syracuse, the average snowiest place in America, where they enjoy an overwhelming 9.6 feet of snow a year, and shut down schools for only two days last year. But our topography is far less hospitable and missteps are a more treacherous proposition. Most would prefer to test the boundaries of flight in an airplane, rather than behind a steering wheel looking down at an expanse of black ice between snow-dusted peaks. In general, things here shut down.

But that’s not always a bad thing.

“You know, we go so chockablock right now with so many people there, to finally have the opportunity to slow down and just drink a cup of hot chocolate or mulled apple cider and just enjoy being. The views are just incredible,” said Deener Matthews, innkeeper and co-owner of The Swag, an inn perched atop the mountains overlooking Waynesville. They shut down to customers in the winter months, but she can recount some treasured family memories being snowed in during the off season.

“We have these individual toboggans, and when we get there with the kids all with us, my husband puts one big, long rope and each kid holds on to the rope and he pulls them up with the Land Rover, all the way up to Gooseberry Knob and they can come sliding down,” said Matthews, or other times she would send kids, strapped up in skis, skiing down the driveway to meet a neighbor and trek up to nearby Cataloochee Ski Resort for a day on the slopes, whose nearness has made various winter snow-ins more idyllic and less survivalist. “We’re very fortunate because we’re the last stop on the way up to the ski slopes, so you can be sure they’re keeping the power on up there.”

True, winter weather can be a threatening prospect. The New York Times described that storied storm in 1993 as “a monster with the heart of a blizzard and the soul of a hurricane,” and laid out such disastrous vocabulary as “spawning … six-foot snowdrifts,” and “worst storm of the century.” Though, to be fair, they did borrow that last one directly from the National Weather Service. But as stories like Matthews’ show, blizzards can be beautiful.

Children love no word more than “cancelled” when there’s enough snow on the ground to accommodate a trash-can-lid-sled, and the cabins frosted in creamy snow against a backdrop of mountains draped in white are the stuff Hallmark movies and Thomas Kincade paintings are made of; his afghans sold like hot cakes for a reason. Out-of-town reviewers up and down Trip Advisor practically squeal with delight at having found themselves snowed in in the mountains.

In 2010, Guy Jacobs and his fellow employees found themselves shut into Eight Gables Inn in Gatlinburg with 10 guests on Christmas, which turned out to me such a singular experience that it has led to something of a tradition with one repeat customer.

“We had one guest, Maria, who comes back every year because it was just so magical for her,” said Jacobs. “When the guests were waking up Christmas morning, it was like a winter wonderland. They couldn’t get out since it wasn’t plowed. We serve breakfast here, so we have some things around. We just happened to have soup in the cabinets and crackers, and we had wood-burning fireplaces, so it was kind-of magical.”

The setting probably didn’t hurt: a bed-and-breakfast tucked away in the mountains, decked out for the holidays, dusted with snow on Christmas Day. If you have to be snowed in…

And Jacobs said most visitors take weather disruptions pretty placidly.

“I think they take it in stride,” Jacobs said. “We’re not up in the mountains and guests don’t feel they’re trapped. There’s a convenience store on the corner, so we’re OK.”

In that way, being snowed in is like a forced family gathering: lovely, as long as you know you’re getting out at some point.

On the other side of the winter weather issue is knowing when that point is, because the pastoral peace of a snowstorm has a pretty short shelf life. The National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration, more commonly and somewhat biblically known as NOAA, is the entity behind the National Weather Service, and they’re the folks that attempt to stay a step or three ahead of the atmosphere’s wily moves.

They have a shockingly extensive cadre of climatology tools in their arsenal that do a pretty decent job of predicting the future. And their recently released winter report for the lower 48 sort-of says, ‘Southeast, don’t expect too much.’ The official report is somewhat densely named Prognostic Discussion For Long-Lead Seasonal Outlooks, and it’s looking like a dry one for our westerly friends and wet winter across the Gulf Coast, but for the rest of us here in the southeast, we’re looking at what weathermen call equal chances.

Which basically means we’re likely to stay close to the averages in temperature and precipitation, according to Chris Horne, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Greenville, S.C., the post that covers most of the Smokies. Or at least, there’s nothing particularly compelling saying we won’t.

“There’s not a whole lot of signals in the forecast pattern for the winter which conclusively says it’s going to be more than normal. We’re kind-of under equal chances,” said Horne. “There’s no signals that are point towards any large deviations from climatology.”

Such a proclamation does bring to mind those—perhaps apocryphal—stories of a clear forecast predicted and then before you know it, we’re stuck with a mountain of snow in front our cars and no one was ready except the cats who intuitively knew to grow thicker coats. And such skepticism was probably warranted in the days before complex weather modeling. Even though future prediction is still somewhat outside our grasp, the climatological advances of even the last two decades have put us far ahead of our predecessors in terms of knowing when we’re going to be stuck inside with some hot cocoa, a toboggan and our own thoughts.

Major seasonal outlooks come from the national weathermen, but it’s local offices like Horne’s that put out seven-day outlooks and make decisions like when to put out winter storm watches and winter storm warnings.

“We use computer model data and then we have a lot of local conceptual models and locally developed techniques and tools where we can recognize patterns from what has happened in the past,” said Horne. “Once we kind of get an idea that it’s possible, then we kind of start digging deeper in our local tools which we have developed over the past couple decades.”

To get on-the-ground data from their vast coverage area, they pick up information from a staggering array of sources. Satellite data of various types, radar at Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, neighboring radar information, upper air data launched from balloons, surface data collection. And those are just the ones he listed off the top of his head when asked by a layperson, essentially, “Hey, how do you wizards do this weather magic?”

Weather has come quite a distance, and in fact, the meteorological field recognizes our own 1993 superstorm as a turning point in storm modeling. In a special report from 2008 looking at the storm 15 years out, the insurance firm Risk Management Solutions said, “the lead times for winter storm watches and winter storm warnings have been described as unprecedented by the National Weather Service,” given the five days of advance warning issued up and down the eastern seaboard.

Today, local NWS offices use the same modeling to give residents a heads up on incoming storms.

According to Horne, a winter storm watch will go out when they’re about 50 percent sure some hazardous weather will arrive in the next 48 hours, give or take about 12 hours. It jumps to a warning when meteorological confidence rises to 80 percent for bad weather in the next 24 hours, and by bad they mean five inches of snow or enough ice to be dangerous.

For non-weather-geeks, this side of snow is not as sexy or picturesque as a crackling fire and a snowman. But these climate modeling techniques and the regional experience of people like Horne, who know what weather will look like when it hits the mountains, help us make sure we’re safely around that fire or building that snowman, not in a newspaper headline about a local man found just feet from front door because who knew that blizzards could happen in March.

If the National Weather Service is to be believed, perhaps we won’t need our snowshoes this year. Our history suggests that it’s possible. Look at 1993, or 1962, when newspaper reports across the state regularly featured high winds in Boone, inches of snowfall on Clingmans Dome and photos of nattily dressed ladies in hats getting their cars ‘winterized’ by kindly gas station attendants.

If this year does not produce a white winter, thought, at least we’ve got our old stories of snowpocalypses past to tell while we wait for the next trace of precipitation to blow our way. And should we have to get snowed in, well, hey, better here than Syracuse.