A normal winter.

A normal winter.

That's exactly what we're having.  The weather here has been normal.

And in Central Wyoming, that means multiple below zero days and heavy snow.

No big deal.

Except it has been for people who moved here in the last two decades. The weather, in spite of climate deniers like to state, has been highly weird.  Warm weather, little snow, rain in February.

That isn't normal. 

This is.

People didn't use to complain about it, but because they've either never experienced a normal winter, or moved here from someplace else, they're howling now.

I've heard from one person repeatedly that her home north of Casper, on a windswept plain, is now snowed in.  She can't go home.  Well, that's why nobody had ever built there until some real estate developer started selling 40 acre "ranches" on the windswept plain.  Even on windswept plains, there are some depressions.  This isn't going to change until May.  Get a plow, get used to it, or move.

A Facebook page is howling with residents who live on the mountain.  They're upset as the county, whose road that is not, but who maintains that road, has not plowed it out.

Well, the road doesn't serve commerce and people who live on the mountain have chosen to do so for a sense of isolation.  Now they have it.

Some were actually advancing a conspiracy theory that the County Commissioners were intentionally not plowing them out so that only super rich people, like "in Jackson Hole", could afford to live on the mountain.

Well, when I was a high schooler, the County used to annually warn mountain residents that they'd be the last to be plowed out.  They were not a priority.

Longtime mountain residents used to often keep a second home in town, if they could afford it, for this reason.  It was the same reason that ranchers, in some areas, kept a "town house" in a nearby town.

They still ought not to be.  With repeated heavy snows, and howling winds, anything done now is going to be temporary.  If they can get plowed out by the weekend so that they can go into town and get groceries, they'd be lucky.

Whether we've returned to normal or not is another question. But this is normal. This weather will be like this until April or May.  People who don't like it ought to find a place, if they can, where the weather is more to their taste, or adjust.