It’s been a wild week for weather, with something for almost everybody. One day, skiing will be ricocheting off iceberg moguls concealed by a combination of a dusting of new snow and flat light. The day before they had been mushy. The day after, they were blown in and really didn’t matter. 

Tuesday’s forecast didn’t call for much snow. I got up and looked out at home and there wasn’t enough to think about. The UDOT cameras showed the roads being mostly bare and no issues. But about Quinn’s Junction, the roads were snow packed and slick, and despite reporting only 5 inches, the parking lot had more than that. It was nuking snow, and turned out to be one of the better powder days of the season. 

Wednesday the sun came out, and we hit stuff that hadn’t been opened the day before in the blizzard, and had another great day in about a foot of untracked fluff. Not bad for the end of March. 

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We’ve got three weeks left in the season. Mud season is in full glory around my house. I made the mistake of trying to groom the ruts out of the road and ended up turning it to a kind of gravel chowder with blocks of ice. 

An owl has set up shop somewhere near my house. I haven’t seen it, but it’s out there hooting every night, loud enough that it might as well be in the bedroom closet. The dogs go listen with their heads cocked at a couple of windows, but don’t seem to care. 

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There were a few sets of tracks along the riverbank opposite my house. I couldn’t get a great look at them, but from the size and placement, I’m pretty sure it was a mountain lion working its way up and down the river. It either was running laps or had company, as there were a couple of sets side by side. 

I put the game camera out, which is the most effective wildlife repellent I’ve ever come across. People spend money on all kinds of weird-smelling concoctions to deter wildlife from eating their gardens.  Nothing works as well as a game camera to drive them all away. So I’ve got it set up to get a picture of the lion pacing the other side of the river, and am certain the lion, or whatever it was, will not make an appearance.

So spring is here — unpredictable and kind of extreme weather, critters on the move, and mud up to the rocker panels on the car.

This used to be the April Fools issue of the paper. All year long the news department would save up ideas for the perfect April Fools story, and on the issue closest to the actual April Fools Day, we would produce a paper packed with made-up news.

Reality was (and is) strange enough around here that it was hard to tell which was made up. Imagine how different the world was, when made-up news happened once a year and was funny instead of having whole networks devoted to making up news that is often terrifying.

We ended up dropping the April Fools issue years ago, after one of the laundry list of former owners of the paper didn’t have a sense of humor. OK, some of the stories were a little too plausible. I did one about United Park City Mines reopening the silver mines. The residents of Deer Valley would just have to get used to the blasting in their crawl spaces rattling the teacups. 

Up until about that time, the paper’s circulation was almost entirely in a single ZIP code. It never occurred to me that somebody in New York would pick up that ridiculous story and cause a bit of a stock market hiccup.

Others wrote stories that were hilarious in the local context, and when read in Los Angeles, where obvious giveaways weren’t obvious, it caused some friction. The new owners then were afraid of getting sued, and we faced the reality that we had crossed a bridge and were a different sort of town. Like Clown Day of old, it was immature, irresponsible, and great fun. It was part of the quirky DNA of a small ski town. 

Clown Day descended to a point that the season passes said on the back that, “This pass is not valid if the user is dressed or made up as a clown.” I was never sure who had to make that determination. This was in the 1980s, when the ski clothes were pretty darn clownish, new out of the box. Unless somebody wore a big red nose, it was a pretty close call whether somebody was dressed as a clown. 

Some of the high-end stuff you see at Deer Valley these days has the same problem. The gold sequin shoulder bag (please tell me there wasn’t a frozen Chihuahua inside) I saw in the lift line today might not have passed muster back in the day.

After several years of active discouragement, Clown Day came back in a less-intoxicated version. It’s an important tradition and good to have it back. Once you start taking things too seriously, you might as well be living in the real world instead of here. Happy Clown Day.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.