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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
February 3, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
During the mid-1880s the cowboy artist Charlie Russell was working for the O.H. Ranch in Montana, where in early 1887 he drew one of his most famous western images. He was in the middle of the famous blue winter, a killer of countless cattle. The story goes that when the owners of the O.H. asked about the condition of the herd, Russell drew a sketch of a bony, starving cow teetering on its last legs and about to become wolf meat. He titled the sketch, "Waiting for a Chinook."
I've found that many people from the eastern reaches of the plains, especially students, don't even know what a "chinook" is. It's a wind. It's what geographers with a cosmopolitan bent call a foehn wind, after its alpine counterpart in southern Europe.
One of the great writers about the chinook on the northern plains is Sid Marty of Alberta, who recently paid us a visit at North Dakota State University. In "Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook," he describes the chinook as simply "a warm Pacific wind that brings temporary spring in the midst of winter."
Why is this Pacific wind out of the southwest warm? Because as it rises, moisture-laden, over the mountains, it begins to condense water, dropping its moisture on the mountains. That releases energy and warms the wind, which warms still more by compression as it comes down the Front Range of the Rockies.
The record for rapid temperature change in the United States is held by Great Falls, Montana, which on Jan. 11, 1980, went from minus 32 F to 15 F -- a 47-degree warm-up -- in seven minutes. That was because of a chinook. The chinook zone of the northern plains and foothills gets warming winds for some 45 days each winter.
In West Fargo I'm a little too far east to get the benefit of a chinook, which is too bad, since I like a good hard wind. So next week I'm flying down to New Zealand to see if I can scare up a good Canterbury nor'wester, the chinook of the Southern Alps. The wind blows in off the cool Tasman Sea, climbs the mountains and sweeps down on the Canterbury plains hot and dry. I love to see it shake those dinner-plate dahlias in Christchurch.
Of course not everyone appreciates a foehn-chinook-nor'wester wind. I visited about this with a meteorologist named Neil Cherry, at Lincoln University, in New Zealand. "About 10 percent of people affected by the nor'wester feel elated and wonderful," says Cherry. That's me. "But the rest feel depressed, irritable and lacking energy. People feel they can't cope with everyday things. . . . There is irrational anxiety and a sense of foreboding."
Many sufferers complain of definite physical and psychological symptoms: migraine, ulcers, depression and other maladies.
So Cherry conducted a survey of citizens on the Canterbury plains and found that 53 percent suffered ill effects from the nor'wester. He says the wind doesn't bother him: "But after three days of nor'westers in a place like Ashburton"--a country town on the plains--"you'll find just about everybody is tired, grumpy and sick of it to some degree."
I may be making a mistake. Heck, if I wanted to be around people who are grumpy and sick in February, I could just stay in frost-bitten, flu-ridden North Dakota.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)