Crazy Winds

This is the time of the year when new residents of the high country call up a real estate broker and scream “sell it NOW!” If you don’t know why, then you’ve either lived here for more than a few years or you’ve been in Costa Rica for the last week or two. Severely cold temperatures and high winds are the true test of will for anyone “living the dream” just a few miles as the crow flies from the continental divide. With all the wind and cold over the last couple of weeks it was almost impossible keeping the house warm. It was so windy at our house that we’d only let the dogs outside to do their business with a strong rope attached to their collars. One of my buddies living near the Justice Center tells me that he’d measured the wind gusts at 80+ MPH. Maybe that explains why my house was shaking so hard on those crazy, windy nights.

If you ever wondered why it get so windy up here in the mountains, here’s the simplest explanation I could find: As wind runs into a mountain it flows up the side until it reaches the top. It cannot continue to flow upwards because wind flowing above the mountain forces it back down. When the rising air reaches the top of the mountain, it has to all funnel all that converging wind through a small area just above the peak. To allow that much wind through a limited amount of space, the wind speed increases. You can see this same effect in a river. When a river is wide, the water flows slowly, but as it narrows, the water speeds up. This is because the same amount of water needs to fit through a smaller space. This principle of fluid dynamics explains the high wind speeds on mountaintops.

Here’s the explanation that I tell my kids at bedtime: When the earth was born, all the winds gathered here in Gilpin/Nederland to decide who was the biggest and loudest wind. They liked living in the mountains so much that they forgot about the gathering and made this their permanent home. That’s why all the wind in the world starts here and is the strongest, loudest wind in the whole world. My daughter, like her mother, is not susceptible to my tall tales. She just looks at me and scowls.

Then she tells me that the winds are made by differential heating and cooling of the earth and oceans, resulting in areas of high and low pressure. Wind and weather move from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. Finally she tells me that there’s this thing called the Coriolis Effect, caused by the rotation of the earth. The Coriolis Effect causes wind to rotate clock-wise around a high pressure system and counter clock-wise around a low pressure system. That’s why we get the nasty high winds in the winter and the awesome upslope snow storms in the spring. There’s no fooling that girl.

All I know is that when I went online to find the cities in America that have the lowest average wind for the year I found a few that I were interesting – Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Medford, Oregon, and Missoula, Montana. Oak Ridge was a city built during World War II to support the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was the effort to build the world’s first nuclear bomb. If you think radon is a problem when it comes to places to live, I’m guess that nuclear research is also a big turn-off. Scratch Oak Ridge from the list. Medford, Oregon looks interesting, but I’m not big on living in truck stop towns. Scratch Medford. That leaves Missoula.

The last time I was in Missoula was when we took our camper to Kalispell for the 4th of July a few years ago. We’d just bought the camper and I had no idea how heavy it really was. I was still learning about the gas mileage you don’t get when you pull a camper when I passed a gas station and said those words to my wife that I’ll never forget – “Don’t worry, we’ll make it to the next gas station. We’ve got plenty of gas!” About 10 minutes later the gauge went from half-a-tank to a quarter-of-a-tank. That’s when I started to get a little nervous. 10 minutes after that when we started up a long series of hills and the gauge started to drop towards empty is when I really got nervous. Assuming the worst I looked at my wife, smiled, and said “I just want to apologize now for running out of gas in the next 5 minutes.” Then a miracle occurred. With the needle on empty we managed to drive another 5 miles uphill, only to spot a gas station on the outskirts of Missoula at the bottom of the hill. To this day I don’t know what got us over that hill into Missoula, but I can tell you it wasn’t a tailwind. I can’t wait to retire to Missoula, but I’m not going to take the camper.

If you’re looking to retire to one of the “least windy” places in the lower 48, here are your top choices:

1. OAK RIDGE,TN

2. MEDFORD, OR

3. MOUNT SHASTA, CA

4. LOS ANGELES C.O., CA

5. CHARLESTON, WV

6. ELKINS, WV

7. ELKO, NV

8. QUILLAYUTE, WA

9. SANTA BARBARA, CA

10. CHATTANOOGA, TN

11. PHOENIX, AZ

12. LONG BEACH, CA

13. TALLAHASSEE, FL

14. MERIDIAN, MS

15. KALISPELL, MT

16. MISSOULA, MT

17. FLAGSTAFF, AZ

18. BAKERSFIELD, CA

19. FRESNO, CA

20. AUGUSTA,GA

21. JACKSON, KY

Send me a postcard when you get there. I'll be here, living the dream, telling my kids tall tales about the home of the winds. Wish me luck, I'm gong to need it!