Last week on Thanksgiving day it was in the sixties in many parts of Montana. Strange to say the least because for some time now it has been cold with even snow on the ground when Thanksgiving rolls around.
It is the wind, those wonderful Chinook winds that cause the temperatures to go up. Just before Thanksgiving early one morning I was awake and heard the winds start up and noticed that the house was getting very warm. I saw that around 5am the temperature outside was almost 50 and the winds had died down.
I was sad because I had hoped to have a roaring fire in the fireplace for Thanksgiving and now that was not going to happen but then I got happy thinking that I was not hearing the boiler go on and so I was not paying for warmth.
But it was the winds that were doing it all.
Just the day before I read that at Heart Butte on Sunday the winds were so terrible that they tipped over several modular sections that made up the Heart Butte School. Not only that but at Deep Creek, just a few miles to the south of Heart Butte, wind gusts were registered at 93 miles per hour. Now that is some wind!
Wind has been a way of life in Montana for years and years and not just east of the divide. The Flathead Valley can have terrible wind storms along with Lake McDonald and Swan Lake.
But, for sustainable winds, east of the divide is where they are the worst.
The Burlington Northern Railroad has had to build wind guards on all their high bridges to make them safe enough for trains to cross in high wind times. Even that does not help if the winds are bad enough. One winter morning I saw the Empire Builder parked at Summit in a bad wind storm. Obviously the officials for that train were not taking a chance of going down the hill and into East Glacier until the winds died down.
Twice at Cutbank, I had stopped for gas only to have the car door almost ripped from the car the winds were howling so strongly on the prairie around town. That was horrible and reminded me of some friends who had gone hunting on the East Front of the Rockies, not far from Cutbank and had so much wind they were crawling down the trails a lot just to get back to their car. The wind was blowing so hard, they could not stand up in it!
Those winds do not just confine themselves to the prairies either. Clear Creek, in the Bear Paw Mountains, has been noted as a place where the wind blows all the time, only sometimes harder than other times.
Good friends named their Clear Creek cabin Breezy Way and I laughed to myself for it should have been called Gale Force Way!
Twice on Clear Creek I have slept in log cabins in wind storms when I thought the roof was going to blow off the cabin. In both instances the roof held on showing what great carpenters built those cabins so many years ago
One other thing. You have probably noticed, if you study the climate of this part of Montana that when the equinox changes, that is when you can expect the winds to be the very worst!
So hold on to your hat and be prepared for a Christmas that will either be warm or cold but one thing will be for sure, that the wind will be blowing and if there is snow, this time of year there will probably be a white out on Marias Pass!
