IF I HEARD this once I’ve heard it a million times from the old-timers who claimed that winters in the old days were a lot harder. They said we don’t have winters like that anymore.
The further back you go into the history, the harder the winters seemed to be.
Then again, this year it seems like we are living on the North Pole. Okay, maybe the North Pole didn’t shift to the Olympic Peninsula. It just feels like it.
After only a few days, snow becomes something of a struggle for survival with power outages, freezing pipes, dead batteries and a myriad of other problems for many of us that are minor details compared to life on the stump ranch during pioneer times.
Perhaps the best description of a Peninsula winter came from the million-seller memoir by Betty McDonald about a pair of newlyweds taking over an abandoned chicken farm in the wilds of Chimacum. Critics maintain that Mcdonald’s book, “The Egg and I” was racist and sexist, but unfortunately these stereotypes were the norm at the time. The book did capture life on the homestead in the 1940s, before electricity, radio and telephones were common. Her description of winter rings true to this day complaining of, “a Mother Nature who made winter so wetly, coldly soggily miserable.”
Some truly memorable weather reporting came from the Press Expedition of 1890. On Jan. 3, they reported 3½ feet of snow at their camp located just west of the current junction of Highway 101 and 112. The snow was reported to be breast high in places down along the Elwha River where the water was filled with floating ice and snow.
The Port Angeles weather station reported that the month of February was the coldest month of the winter with temperatures 7.8 degrees lower than normal.
That was nothing compared to the hard winter of 1893. That’s what the old-times called the winter of the blue snow.
After six weeks of snow through February and March, the Hoquiam River and the Queets froze over.
There was 4 feet of snow on the Humptulips Prairie and 6 feet in Quinault. That was the year snow started falling in Port Angeles on Jan. 27 and fell every day through Feb. 7 until 75 inches were measured on the ground.
The temperature fell to one degree below zero. That was the hardest winter ever recorded in Port Angeles, made even harder by what was known as “The Panic of ’93.”
This was a depression or a recession or what they called just plain old-fashioned hard times.
It started off when wheat prices crashed. Before they knew it, 500 banks closed and 15,000 businesses failed, among them the Northern Pacific Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad.
This came as a shock to the sparse population of the Olympic Peninsula, whose railroad dreams had convinced no one that a mountainous peninsula surrounded on three sides by treacherous waterways would be an ideal terminus for the transcontinental railroad.
The country was so broke during the hard winter of 1893 that President Grover Cleveland had to borrow money.
Some things never change.
Folks have a saying around here, if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change.
You probably won’t like it then either.
When the snow finally melts, it will be nice to stop complaining about the snow and go back to complaining about the drizzly, overcast 40-degree monsoon that typically defines the Olympic Peninsula weather.
Then we’ll be able to say that winter of ‘25 was a hard one.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
