Drive north of Greeley on U.S. 85 and you'll find something Bill Hutcheson's never seen in his 82 years in Weld County.
Nature-made snowballs called snow rollers are scattered through fields all the way from La Salle to Ault.
"I was born here in 1919, and this is a lifetime experience," Hutcheson, who owns a farm east of Ault, said Monday.
Hutcheson was awed by cylindrical snowballs about every 4 feet along several sections of the highway, many of them reaching half-bushel size. The most impressive collection is on either side of Lucerne, he said. Snow rollers occur when temperatures get warm enough, winds get high enough and snow gets deep enough, said National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Barjenbruch.
The temperature has to be right at or just above freezing, he said. Hutcheson speculated the same thing - and he's no meteorologist.
"It takes a certain temperature; it takes a certain wind and it takes a certain snow combined together just right," he said. "You'll probably never see it again."
A snow roller forms when a big snowflake bounces across the ground a few times, catching more snowflakes with each bounce. When it becomes too heavy to bounce, it begins to roll, collecting more snow as it moves.
"It acts like a person in the back yard making a snowman," Barjenbruch said. "You don't hear of them often. I'd have to say it's pretty rare," said Barjenbruch, who's never actually seen a snow roller.
Hutcheson puts the phenomenon right up there with seeing three frog-sized grasshoppers on a farm near Gilcrest in the summer of 1936. He later learned they were supposed to be extinct.
Hutcheson isn't the only Weld resident excited about the snow rollers. Several readers called the Greeley Tribune on Monday to report them.
"I've been around this earth for 50 years and my uncle's been around for 70 some-odd years and neither one of us has ever seen this before in our lives," said Kathy Schneider, who lives on Weld County Road 43 southeast of La Salle. "It's weird."
Snow joke
Snow rollers aren't a new phenomenon. Norwegian Roald Amundsen reported seeing cylinders of snow when he journeyed to the South Pole in 1911. In 1957, Paul Siple recorded accounts of balls of frost about 2 inches across on his South Pole trip. Last December, Kansas State University's Weather Data Library documented snow rollers as large as 30-gallon drums in Russell County, Kan.
