Irene Shonle, CSU Extension Gilpin County. It is now fall, and of course, many people are thinking about what the winter will bring. How much wood should we cut? Will it be a good ski season? To get answers, some people turn to natural phenomena for a clue.

For instance, folklore says the woolly bear caterpillar can predict the severity of the winter. If the red-orange band at the center of its body is wide, this is said to mean that winter will be warm. The narrower the red-orange, the colder, more snowy the winter will be. Some even say that the direction in which they are crawling adds to the story (crawling north = mild winters, south = bad winter). However, this doesn’t really ‘bear’ (pun intended) out in actuality. For instance, the same group of eggs can hatch into caterpillars with varying dark and light bands. Which individual should you believe in that case? Given that many variables contribute to the caterpillar’s coloration, including larval stage, food availability, temperature or moisture during development, age, and even species, we can see that the width of the band cannot give us much useable information.

Another common folk predictor of snow is the height of the mullein stalks. The saying goes that the taller the mullein, the more snow we will get this winter. While fun, it is, again, not accurate. The height of the mullein plant has everything to do with past (this summer and the last summer’s) growing conditions and even the nutrient level in the soil and the amount of sun the plant gets, and nothing to do with what is coming this winter.

Another local story holds that if the Western Virgin’s Bower clematis has a lot of seed on it in the fall, there is going to be a lot of snow that year. As with the mullein, the amount of seed has to do with this summer’s growing conditions, and not the coming winter.

The saying with artic gentians (the beautiful white flowers striped with blue that grow on the tundra) is that, once they bloom, snow will fly within six weeks. This is perhaps slightly more accurate, simply because they bloom in mid-late August, and the average first snow on the peaks is in early-mid September, but again, the plants have no way of “knowing” when the snow will fall; they just bloom in response to the shortening days.

Enjoy the folklore and the history, but take any predictions with a large grain of salt.

This will be my final article for the paper. I have very much enjoyed my time up here working with you all, and I bid everyone a fond farewell. I hope you all have a wonderful fall.  The Extension office will have an interim director, Jennifer Cook, who will be up here one day a week until a full-time director is hired. Please email her at Jennifer.cook@colostate.edu to set up a time to meet. The Extension office will not be keeping regular office hours for the time being.

The CSU Gilpin County Extension Office is located at the Exhibit Barn, 230 Norton Drive, Black Hawk, CO 80422, 303-582-9106, www.gilpin.extension.colostate.edu. Colorado State University Extension provides unbiased, research-based information about, horticulture, natural resources, and 4-H youth development. Colorado State University Extension is dedicated to serving all people on an equal and nondiscriminatory basis. 

(Originally published in the September 26, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)