Going turkey hunting? You might want to take along your snow boots. As the last couple of weeks have shown, Wyoming’s springtime weather doesn’t usually follow the pattern people in other states are used to. Our weather events of all types tend to come along about a month after the norm.
In the rest of the country, people talk about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. While we get our share of wind in March, quite often it’s April that brings the lionlike winds. Only it isn’t confined to the beginning of the month, with the lamb bringing us out; the whole darn month is windy.
And then there’s the April showers bringing May flowers thing. Not so much here. Our April showers are more likely to be snow showers. We might get some warm weather to melt the snow down, but it’s usually followed by freezing temperatures that turn all that standing water into solid ice.
By May, instead of those promised flowers, we’ll be looking at mud puddles deep enough to swallow small SUVs. If any flowers are dumb enough to poke their petals out of the leftover snow banks, they’ll be quickly covered in brown, sticky goo.
It all makes the spring turkey season quite a bit more interesting than a fall hunt. The temperature can swing from 10 degrees in the morning to the upper 60s in the afternoon. By the time the sun’s starting to sink again, it might drop back down below freezing again, but not before it starts raining cats and dogs. As the temperature falls, the rain’ll turn to snow. The good news is that if enough snow falls, or if the temperature drops far enough, when you lose your footing – and you will – you might have a soft cushion of snow to fall on, or the mud might be frozen solid, and you won’t get covered by it. You might break some bones, but you won’t have to chisel the mud off later. Good luck this spring!
