ROUGH & TUMBLE
West winds cause 'weed-mageddon'
Let’s get ready to tumble! A tumbleweed stampede has enveloped communities across Utah and Nevada, burying homes and cars and jamming roadways — forcing towns to rally heavy equipment to dig out.
Hitching a ride on the high winds generated by powerful winter storms in the Sierra Nevadas, the prickly interlopers rolled into town by the thousand in a scene out of a spaghetti western on steroids.
‘You just laugh’
In Pahrump, Nev., the landscape looked alive with movement as far as the eye could see as endless waves of unruly undergrowth enshrouded the city’s dusty main drag, Washington Post video shows.
Residents of South Jordan, Utah, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City, woke up to their homes buried in the gnarly rollers — and the massive drifts reaching the second-story window of some homes.
Fortunately, the unusual sighting was more of an annoyance than anything else for residents.
“What can you do? You just laugh. There’s nothing to do but laugh,” John Young, whose South Jordan home was besieged by tumbleweeds this weekend, told KSL, which posted its own video of the vegetative mayhem. “You take pictures, you take videos and you hope the wind changes.”
Armed with rakes and snow shovels, residents put in a team effort in clearing sidewalks and driveways. The city sent in reinforcements, calling in a backhoe to clear the heaps of problematic plants from the roadways.
“This is not our first tumblemageddon.”
Tumbleweeds are actually the remains of a Russian thistle plant, which break free from the soil to roam around the landscape untethered after their roots die in the winter.
The invasive species is thought to have been unleashed upon American soil by Russian immigrants arriving in South Dakota in the 1870s, who carried flax seed contaminated with Russian thistle seeds, according to news site Treehugger.