Happy New Years to THE RANCH OF TO ROCKIES, I’m Gary Woirhaye the treasurer for the Ranch.

The Board gets asked a lot about the burn pit and when is it going to open. Then we get asked how many feet snow do we need to burn the pit.

Well it all determined on how much moisture there is, how much wind there is. When I was a boy I would spent time at my grandparents’ house at Hebgen Lake in Montana, My grandfather was the caretaker on the dam for Montana power. Each day he would have to report precipitation to the state.

He had a little weather station out by the highway and would check it each day. In the winter there was a brass tube that collect snow fall. Every 24 hours he would get the brass tube out and measure the snow fall, then take it in the house and run hot water over the tube to melt the snow so he could measure the moisture in the snow. If it was a sugar snow, there wouldn’t be much moisture to it. But if it was a spring snow, wet heavy, there could be almost 2” of water in 12” of snow.

So when is the burn pit going to burn? It all depends on the moisture we get.

I hope that kind of helps people understand how it works finding out how much moisture there is in each snow fall

From Your Treasurer, Gary Woirhaye

Have a Happy and Safe New Year.

Note: As many of you may know, we were able to burn the pit this year, so we should be able to use it this coming summer. TW.