Winter Goes Out With A Bang At Grandfather Mountain

Workers at Grandfather Mountain thought the weather was weird enough when 9.2 inches of snow fell Easter Weekend. This event was the first significant snowfall for the 2006-2007 winter with no other daily snowfall total even breaking five inches before then.

Just one week later a weather system moved across the country causing many problems and Grandfather Mountain was not immune. High winds and snow arrived on Sunday, April 15 and when the staff returned on Monday morning they encountered the sight of many fallen trees all up and down the Mountain.

The extent of most of the damage was located between Half Moon Overlook and the area of the Nature Museum and Animal Habitats. No structural damage occurred at Grandfather Mountain but most of the buildings were without power until Wednesday morning. The Top Shop didn’t regain electricity for good until Thursday morning.

The high winds lingered around during the beginning of the week making clean up a much harder and more dangerous task. A total of three inches of snow was recorded at the Top Shop on Monday after a little bit of melting had already occurred.

Phones began ringing off the hook with people wanting to know how hard the wind blew April 14 – 15.

Grandfather Mountain installed a new anemometer February 15 on the Mile High Swinging Bridge in response to claims by the experts that the wind speeds measured by the wind sensor on the roof of the Top Shop building were not accurate.

Unfortunately this new anemometer has not been recording data since April 2 because of an internal problem in the data logger.

“April is our wind month, said Grandfather Mountain Naturalist Jesse Pope, “so we are disappointed that we haven’t been able to record wind speeds. It is something internally in the logger like a wire short or a loose connection.”

Although it would have been interesting if the new anemometer had been in operation to clock the actual wind speeds, the staff does not believe that any records were broken. One reason for this belief is that the winds during the storm were coming out of the southeast and all of Grandfather’s record breaking winds have previously come from the northwest. In addition, none of the Mountain’s weather instruments were damaged in the storm.

“We did not see the damage up top this time like we saw in January 2006 when our old anemometer recorded 200 mph,” said Grandfather Mountain President Crae Morton. “That January we saw lots of damage to the Top Shop and a large boulder in the parking lot was moved by the winds and nothing like that occurred this time.”

The Mountain expects Ameen Syed from the State Climate Office of North Carolina to come up to Grandfather in the next few weeks to fix the problem and get the anemometer back on track to record wind speeds.

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