March has entered like lamb. If weather forecasts hold it looks like it will want to stick around like a lion for awhile here. Forecasts currently call for snow to begin towards the end of the week in Rocky Mountain National Park with the potential for heavy snows occurring through this weekend.
This is great news for Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park. February was a good month for moisture and to be able to compound it with a big snow dump in March would be great. March is typically our snowiest month, though in recent years March has actually underperformed. A good spring blizzard feels like a Colorado tradition and a right of passage that every new resident to the state or visitor to the state should experience.
A couple days of good heavy, wet snow followed by warm sunshine and a quick melt off is always welcome here even though many of us are getting the itch for summer and warmer weather to return to RMNP.
The snow and weather changing should help to present some good photography opportunities moving forward. Photographing the storm during and after should lead to some good potential winter images, but the moisture from these storms will help get the rivers flowing, the wildflowers blooming this summer and hopefully keep our fire damage down as we enter the warmer months.
Frankly, by this time of the season, as a photographer I think we are all just looking for some new opportunities to open up as we start to grow tired of the brown season in the lower elevations of RMNP.
Getting a big dump of snow is great, but as I stated in my blog post last week, 3 inches or 3 feet of snow does not really make much of a difference when it comes to actually photography. In fact, if we do get a big dump of snow (some forecasts are saying 2+ feet), it may be difficult or impossible to travel around the park and local roads.
So at this point we will just wait it out and see what develops in the coming week. We certainly will be getting snow in Rocky Mountain National Park, the only question is just how much, will travel be possible and will those westerly winds that follow these storms hold off long enough to give us a window or two to photograph the landscape before blowing the snow off the pines. All I can say at this point is stay tuned!.