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Show If only Park City had a weather wizard... Once upon a time there was a cranky old emperor who decided that the weather in his kingdom was boring. He told his wizards that he was tired of the same old sun, rain and snow falling out of the sky season after season and he commanded them to cook up something new. The results were disastrous. In their infinite foolishness the wizards invented a sticky green substance which fell from the skies and gummed up the whole kingdom. As the tale goes, the emperor realized the error of his ways, found a clever enough wizard to clean up the mess and never complained about the sun and the rain and the snow again. Now, if that old emperor had lived in Park City, it would have been a different story. He could never have been bored with the weather and the chances are that he would have had a healthy respect for those things which fall from the sky. He would never have hired a bunch of amateur wizards to tamper with something as powerful as Mother Nature. Take last week, for instance. First, a grey storm front threw a blanket of winter over Park City, smothering all previous signs of spring. Then a strong north wind sliced through the front, broke it up into big billowing clouds and scattered them across the horizon. It blew right through the weekend, trimming tree branches, tangling kite strings and tipping over magpie nests. By Monday the storm seemed to have blown itself out, but it was followed up by a sneaky band of thunderheads which dumped sheets of rain on the unprepared citizens below. Well, maybe a wise wizard or two could have managed the week a little bit better. But I doubt it. If the emperor were a skier, he would have got just enough new snow to keep him happy on top of the mountain. If he were up there with any of my sunburned friends he probably would have had a pretty good day. But if in his enthusiasm for spring skiing he had ordered any more snow, he would have had to shovel the palace driveway. If instead, he had been so thoroughly tired of winter that he had commanded his wizard to start summer right away, his moat would have flooded. The steep hillsides of his kingdom would have slid and his favorite trout stream would have overrun its banks. Even with the help of a clever wizard he would have had his hands full trying to keep all of the royal subjects happy. Some of them would have asked for less wind so they could have gone cycling and some would have asked to crank it up so they could go windsurfing. It is a good thing emperors and wizards don't come up for reelection. Who knows what special interest groups might have convinced the emperor to try. And it is probably a good thing, too, that nobody has control over the weather in Park City. If they did we would never have seen those big thunderheads turn bright orange over the Uintas last Sunday or smelled a rainstorm on Monday. |