30 December 2023
Mud.
That was the principal difference between this winter and the winter of 1877-78.
Mud. It made Christmas travel miserable and miserably slow. Wagon wheels got clogged. Horses became exhausted. Sleigh delays must have rivaled the inconvenience of the modern airport. Finery took a beating in a slip or splash, mixed as the mud was with, well, mixed as it was.
Veteran TV meteorologist John (Doppler) Dooley sent me the fascinating facts of “The Year Without Winter: 1877-78.” Facts tend to be important. We’ve been sold the hysterically childish notion that a “climate crisis” is responsible for the look out your window. There is no such thing as a climate crisis except for the urgency with which green theologians would have us return to the days of mud. The Yellowstone caldera blowing up would result in a climate crisis, but that wouldn’t be man-made now, would it?
According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the winter of 1877-78 was the warmest on record for the Twin Cities and Duluth, with December of 1877 so outrageously — the DNR’s word — warm with a 33.8 degree average that the record has seemed untouchable, like DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. December-February 1877-78 had an average temperature if 29 degrees. The winter of 1930-31 came close at 26.9 degrees and the winter of 2001-02 came in at 26.8.
We could break the 147-year-old record at long last. Currently, our December average is 35.1, beating 1877 by 1.3 degrees. But we don’t know what’s in store. According to the DNR, three days with subzero temperatures in early January 1878 froze the Mississippi River in St. Paul so that it was closed for navigation until Feb. 28. After January 7, 1878, only three days of the remainder of winter experienced single-digit temperatures or lower.
In other words, we’ve got at least two months to go before we can crown a new record warm winter. Because I no longer skate and don’t like to shovel, I’m rooting for us.
Given our record of championships around here, it’s hard to believe we could steal away anything. We’d have to get only a handful of single-digit temps between now and ice-outs. By the way, ice-out for Lake Minnetonka was March 11 in 1878, 33 days earlier than the average ice-out date of April 13. I’ve always wondered what happened that year. Now I know.
A guy name William Cheney regularly prepared monthly weather newspaper summaries in Minneapolis. According to the DNR, Cheney wrote that December featured unprecedented weather, foggy days, rain, lousy sleighing and ice-free conditions on rivers above and below Lake Pepin. Sounds familiar. Cheney wrote that December 1857 was most similar.
Cheney made wonderful observations, noting that February 1878 made small demands on the fuel pile, or observing that March 1878 was 12 degrees warmer than the average of 33 years at Fort Snelling.
Let the record show that these are facts. Go ahead and anticipate the next computer model of doom if you must, but facts tell us the world isn’t ending anytime soon. Everything we experience has been experienced before, including brown Christmases, 13 since just 1953. And when you look out your window, you’re not seeing the result of too many minivans. You are getting a glimpse of what 1877-78 was like, inconvenient to green theology as that must certainly be.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected]. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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