The climate here in the San Juan Mountains is definitely unique; instead of four more or less three-month seasons, we get winters that seem to go on forever, and springs that are often more wintry than winter itself: up on the headwaters of the San Miguel, where I live, we often get our most serious blizzards after the ski lifts close. Summer and fall, on the other hand, are over almost before they begin: everyone has heard the old locals' knee-slapper, about the guy who went up to Denver one September weekend and came home to find that he'd missed autumn and it was already winter. What does summer mean, anyhow, in a place like Telluride, where within living memory it has snowed on July 7 hard enough to wipe out almost all of the flowerbeds in town? And springs here are different, too: I remember many years when the leaves on the aspens above Tomboy Road, known locally as "harbinger trees," were already turning red, bronze and yellow while the aspens on Sunshine and Wilson mesas were still putting out their first tentative green leaves.

Everything is different weather-wise, here in the mountains. Every few years we get hit by a micro-burst thunderstorm that rains so hard so fast that Mini-Cooper-sized boulders float away like corks and entire mountainsides liquefy; the storm cell is no longer than a soccer field, and everywhere around it the sun is shining through the clouds and the air is calm and warm. This last January in eastern San Miguel County, we had winds that gusted at more than 100 miles an hour; a friend of mine who lives up on the mesas was carrying her baby out to the car one morning, when a gale-force blast hit without warning and nearly ripped the child out of her arms.

 This winter was a classic, here in southwestern Colorado. Avalanche chutes up on Lizard Head Pass that hadn't run in at least a century cut loose, triggered by the collapse of giant wind-drifted cornices; it took days for the Colorado Department of Transportation to re-open the road. I missed three dentist appointments in Durango. When the plows finally cut their way through, you could see the enormous scale of the snowpack: between Trout Lake and the s-curves below Rico long stretches of the highway ran between walls of 10-foot-high snow, frozen hard as marble. The pass itself was closed for four days in a row at one point; Lizard Head, Wolf Creek, Red Mountain and Coal Bank passes were all blocked too. A carfull of Telluriders homeward bound from New Mexico found themselves trapped in Durango; they decided to take the long way around, west from Cortez across the beanfields to Egnar, north through Dry Creek Basin and Disappointment Valley, and back through Norwood and Placerville. Unfortunately, they hit whiteout conditions and zero visibility just west of Cortez; the Patrol had the highway blocked, and they had to wait for hours for the wind to die down before they could see enough to start moving again.

Their story reminded me of a similar storm-plagued trip John and Carlotta Horn and I made from Farmington to Telluride two-plus decades ago. The three of us happened to be on the same Phoenix to Telluride flight, and we found ourselves stranded in Farmington when the airline informed us that Telluride Airport was shut down due to blizzard conditions and waning daylight. We managed to scavenge the last available rental car, a bald-tired two-wheel-drive American version of the old East German Trabant ("the car that lost the Cold War," according to wags), and headed north, John at the wheel. The weather around Farmington was tranquil and non-threatening, but by the time we made it to Mancos, it was raining so hard the rental wreck was aquaplaning on the flooded pavement. I don't know why, but the Mancos Cutoff seems to experience some of the most severe weather in the entire Four Corners area. When we got to Dolores, the monsoonal rain became a torrential snowfall, huge flakes coming down so thick and fast it was hard to see beyond the hood of the car; night had fallen, and the snow was building up so fast on the headlights that we had to stop every five minutes so I could get out, run around to the front of the car, and scrape it off. Plus the highway crews hadn't plowed yet, there were no tire tracks to follow: obviously no one had driven north out of Dolores since the snow began. Occasionally there was a deafening explosion of thunder, and a massive bolt of lightning lit up the entire sky for a split second, illuminating the entire mountainscape and sky: millions of snowflakes spiraling down, thousands of diamond-bright trees, phosphorescent peaks and ridges, the ice-filled river glowing like a lava flow in its frozen trench . . . For the blink of an eye, what the Germans call an augenblick, a blast of information and detail that totally overwhelms the senses, and then back to darkness . . .

San Juan weather: beautiful, perilous, and totally beyond reason. Teetering on the brink of Mud Season, the Cruelest Month, postholing toward a summer that still feels as unreal and remote as the summit of Chomolungma, what can you do but tip your hat to the local deities, and acknowledge their primacy, their timeless reign?