Snow leaves cattle in search of food
Up against the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountain Front, the snow is deep and the cattle are hungry.
Any rancher worth his salt is prepared for a severe storm in February, but the dump of snow that piled in over the weekend was almost beyond memory — something that no one could fully prepare for.
“I’ve been here 60 years and I’ve never seen it this deep,” said Ross Williams, pausing to look at the piles of snow outside his window.
Williams grazes his cattle on pastures roughly 6 miles east of St. Mary, Mont. There, the snow is more than 4 feet deep on the flat.
From the Canadian border south, past where the Teton River flows east out from the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a chest-high layer of snow blankets the Rocky Mountain Front. Folks who live and work in this rugged country are used to hard winters.
The worst of the storm hit in a narrow band about 15 miles wide starting at the base of the mountains. Head east of Browning or Bynum in Montana and the snow is measured in inches. West of that line, and it’s measured in feet.
“We’ve got well over 4 feet on a level of snow out here,” said Verna Billedeaux, extension agent for the Blackfeet Indian Reservation Agriculture Extension Office in Browning.
“It’s not a real wet snow,” Billedeaux said. “It’s kind of a loose, fluffy snow that creates huge problems in trying to move around. I went out to the corral yesterday morning to get some feed to my horses, and it is past my waist to even get to the gate. That took a lot of energy.”
The ranchers may be well on their way toward digging out from the storm’s first assault, but concern remains over high winds forecast to begin Thursday. The National Weather Service is predicting Chinook winds will sweep down from the mountains, with sustained winds of 25 to 30 miles an hour and gusts up to 50 mph.
The winds will bring warmth and melt some snow but also will create drifts, erasing humans’ attempts to cope.
“It”s pretty light powder snow, and it hasn’t had a chance to settle,” said Brent Roeder, Teton County agriculture extension agent. “If we get a big wind in there and it starts to move the snow around, it’s going to be a nightmare both for road crews and for ranchers.”