Tumbling Tumbleweeds

Images from the Bozeman Daily Chronicle galleries

BOZEMAN, Mont. - Montana residents are used to digging themselves out after heavy snowstorms, but residents of one neighborhood had to put a snowplow to different use: clearing mounds of tumbleweed from their driveways.

Winds flooded a Springhill-area neighborhood with tumbleweed Tuesday, covering sheds, burying mailboxes and blocking a street and driveways. (MSNBC, March 28, 2007)

There is a distinct possibility this may be of interest only to my mother and me. There was a tumbleweed storm in Bozeman this Tuesday. I grew up in the Midwest and delivered newspapers from age 7 through 16 so let's just say I had an 'intimate' relationship with the weather there . We had horizontal hail storms, big drifting blizzards, tornadoes, June bug infestations, occasional dust storms, and the ever present ugly humidity making everything feel hotter and colder than the actual temperature. (In fact I can recall the year, a guy named Einstein I think, came up with the "wind chill factor" to reflect the whole sense of 'it really feels colder than what the temperature gauge says'.) Anyway, I had never heard of a tumbleweed storm. This is clearly a Western weather phenomena. There were dozens of newspapers across the country that picked up the Bozeman tumbleweed storm story, including those in Montana, but none published the pics for some reason. (including the Bozeman Chronicle!)

(Mom, here is the Gene Autry link to Tumbling Tumbleweeds)