Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Let me be clear: Spring Creek Basin does NOT look like this currently. It DID look like this Thursday morning – for a couple of daylight hours after we woke up to a couple of inches of fresh snow, after the previous fresh snow melted (a few hours after we woke up to THAT snow).

So think of the basin and lower Disappointment Valley not as covered with snow but saturated with mud (damp to downright soupy) … and imagine, if it please you, spring green and a profusion of wildflower blooms. Especially if you’re still covered with inches to feet of snow, it should be a happy vision!

This image shows snow from the last big snowstorm. Oddly, though the rest of Southwest Colorado (well, all of western Colorado, apparently?) seems to be getting fairly hammered by snow, Disappointment Valley seems to be a bit sheltered from the storm – literally. It *has* snowed … but it seems to be coming from Utah and blowing on to Kansas! The wind has been strong and sharp, and it hasn’t allowed much snow to *fall* let alone settle.

We had a lot of melting of all that snow Corazon is standing in – with temps in the balmy-seeming 50s. Actual creeks (Spring and Disappointment) ran with melting snow-water and the melting made tiny (to not-so-tiny) creeks where arroyos or any other low channels existed.

The landscape IS white again, but maybe only an inch or so has actually settled out of the wind-blown flurries.