Members of the C work session's Milepost and Whistle Board Crew try to get to Chama the preceding weekend to have time for scouting, exploration, train watching and photography. In 2012, we went up to Cumbres Pass on the Sunday before the work session to do some landscape photography on the ridges south and west of the pass. While we were making way through forest that's roughly between Cumbres and Windy Point, several of us came upon a small installation of equipment in a clearing in the woods. There was a large pillow like a water bed flush with the ground and covered with a metal mesh, and several pieces of equipment adjacent and above. There was minimal labeling on the equipment but we surmised it was an automated weather station.
- Photo courtesy of Terry Woolsey
I did some Google searching that evening and learned that the Cumbres site ("Cumbres Trestle") is one of many such sites maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in mountains across the West to measure precipitation and snowfall accumulations. One big use is to help resource planners predict spring runoff.
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/If I've done this right, here's a link to the Cumbres site's data. There's a lot of snow up there, folks.
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/nwcc/site?sitenum=431&state=co
