Montague Still Snow Champ

Published Jan. 22, 1997, in The Post-Standard.

By SEAN KIRST

There is a movement under way to give big storms the common names of men. That leaves an easy option for naming the enormous Tug Hill snowfall of Jan. 12.

Call it the Roger Maris storm, and throw on an asterisk.

Like Maris, the big storm at Montague broke a longtime and legendary record. Like Maris, it touched off a furious debate among the experts about which record and which era should rule supreme. Like Maris, it left no easy way to solve the argument.

Most of all, and most like Maris, Bill Ottoshavett - the Tug Hill spotter who recorded the actual record snow - is so sick of inquiries and argument and phone calls that he has temporarily stopped talking to the media.

Watch out, Bill. For Roger, it got so bad his hair fell out in clumps.

The great snowfall debate of '97 - whose long and hardy winds may soon eclipse the storm itself - entered its latest phase Tuesday. The National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., ruled that Montague, a little town on the Tug, really did get 77 inches of snow Jan. 12 over a 24-hour period.

"We're not questioning the measurements in Montague," said Louis Uccellini, director of the office of meteorology in Washington."We feel very comfortable with them. In and of itself, that (measurement) will stand."

However, Montague might want to wait before it starts ordering commemorative roadside plaques. There is still the little problem that Roger Maris also faced.

The old record, set in 1921, was established in Silver Lake, Colo. That storm piled up 76 inches of snow in 24 hours. News of the Montague snowfall set off an ... ahem ... flurry of e-mail to Washington from Colorado snow experts, all of them concerned with the way the Tug Hill snow was measured.

Those weather folks have great respect for the old record at Silver Lake, a desolate mountain station not far from a glacier. Before giving that record up, the Colorado experts wanted to know about water density readings and drifting patterns up on Tug Hill.

More than anything - and the point of contention that in the end caused Uccellini to take notice - they wanted to know how often Montague's snow was actually measured in the storm.

The National Weather Service, after close review, decided Tug Hill's snow was recorded properly by Ottoshavett, who did six measurements in 24 hours. The problem is that only one measurement was taken in 1921 at Silver Lake. Since snow packs down and settles as it piles up, the weather service is wondering now if even more than 76 inches of snow fell in 1921 in Colorado.

That brings us back to the plight of Roger Maris. In 1961, while nostalgic hostility caused clumps of Maris' hair to drop right off, he pursued and passed Babe Ruth's single season home-run record. It was not a popular thing for him to do.

At the time, baseball's rulers cuffed Maris with an asterisk in the record books. That's because he needed eight extra games to pass the old record held by the exalted Bambino.

Now Montague may find itself in the same position. Uccellini isn't ready to say he'll keep both records in the book and simply use an asterisk to explain the measurement difference. But it seems like there's no other easy way out.

The alternative would be to add some inches by equation onto Silver Lake's total. That undoubtedly would steam the meteorologists back East. They would soon be claiming that the guy who did the measurements in 1921 could have been some moonshine-swilling Snuffy Smith, who took a ruler and stuck it in the biggest drift he saw.

No, thanks. The only logical solution is going back to Roger Maris, although Uccellini isn't making any final ruling yet.

"Within the climate community, there's a concern for having all of these records as accurate as possible," he said. "People pay attention to snowfall. What we're trying to do is determine how to compare these events."

You could determine it with a snowflake, which makes a pretty asterisk.

Sean Kirst is a columnist for The Post-Standard.






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