Weather extremes: Four decades later, a record untouchably low

HAWLEY LAKE – On a recent afternoon at the coldest place in Arizona, a pair of kayakers paddled a lazy circle around the curving edge of the coldest lake in Arizona as a family stood on shore casting lines for the coldest fish in Arizona.

The four Chihuahuas trailing the family didn't appear to need coats, or even sweaters, but no one else did, either. It's June and even the coldest place in Arizona warms up in June.

But on Jan. 7, 1971, in a wooden shelter a few hundred yards from the lake, a thermometer registered a temperature of 40 degrees below zero, a reading that turned out to be the lowest temperature ever recorded in Arizona.

Now, if you're reading this from outside Arizona, or perhaps if you just arrived here in the last few weeks, this next part will probably be hard to believe: It does get cold in Arizona.

Not Minnesota cold, not all-winter-long ice-fishing cold, maybe.

But cold enough to freeze lakes, and freeze pipes, and one time, to send thermometers plunging so low that most thermometers couldn't handle it at all.

Arizona's diverse topography creates an equally diverse climate. Depending on the time of year, the number 102 could mean a high temperature in degrees or a snow depth in inches. But the number 40 below can only mean one thing. And that's where the thermometer dipped, in one spot, on one night, back in 1971.

Hawley Lake wasn't a real town back in 1971 and is less so today. The lake, about 30 miles from Pinetop in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, belongs to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which manages it as a fishing and recreation site.

Pine-studded ridges surround the lake, forming the walls of a big bowl, a remnant of a long-dead volcano and a place where cold air can pool like hot soup. Long-abandoned cabins hide amid the ponderosas on a warren of twisting dirt roads. Cattle graze around the shoreline and among the trees. Chipmunks skitter across rocks and through tiny clumps of yellow and violet wildflowers.

A lodge, a store and boat docks still operate near the dam, which keeps water in the lake and allows the tribe to release it occasionally for irrigation. On summer weekends, the lake is a popular retreat for locals and tourists.

In 1971, a handful of hardy souls lived in some of the cabins during the winter, among them the caretaker for the roads and public buildings, a man who also kept track of the weather.

It's possible there have been colder days in Arizona's history and colder places, in real towns even, but Hawley Lake had something those other places didn't: a wooden shelter with a thermometer that carried the imprimatur of the then-newly named National Weather Service.

Because of that – and some well-timed improvements to the wooden shelter – the temperature on that frigid January morning was entered into the weather-service record books, and Hawley Lake became the coldest place in Arizona, a distinction that, for reasons that will become clear, could be difficult to erase.

ARIZONA'S EXTREME WEATHER

The story of the cold

Rica Girardi used to visit her grandmother in McNary, a town on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation about 14 miles from Hawley Lake. During the winter, grandma's house always seemed to have more snow than young Rica's back in Lakeside. Later, she would learn about elevation and snow levels, but kids see things through their own eyes.

"That's not fair!" she would tell her parents.

Growing up, Girardi would hear stories about winters past, cold ones, snowy ones, but the stories never ended with a mention of a new weather record. People talked about the snowstorm that brought down the roof of Wilbur's market or the cold spell that froze vehicles in their tracks.

Like many people in Pinetop these days, Girardi doesn't feel like she's living just down the road from the coldest place in Arizona.

"Forty below?" she said, her eyes widening. "I can't even imagine that. It'll get cold here, maybe dip below zero, but if you wait, it'll be nice again."

Girardi runs a restaurant and catering business and, with her sisters, helps manage a second restaurant and hosts a public-access cooking show called "My Sister Can't Cook." For her family, wild swings in the weather can affect business, especially during the winter, when the number of tourists seems proportional to the depth of snow at nearby Sunrise Park ski resort.

"Sometimes people in Phoenix think if it snowed, they can't go to Pinetop, but it's so beautiful up here in winter," Girardi said. "I tell people from other places we ski and they say, 'Oh, you can ski in Arizona?' They think Arizona is a desert."

Girardi loves the contrasts of snowy white drifts blanketing the deep green stands of ponderosa pines. She likes that her kids can play outside. And she appreciates the difference in elevation on days when she shovels snow and finds none down the road in Show Low.

"You never know what you're going to get," she said.

Keeping a record

Every morning at 6:45, Carl-Eric Granfelt opens a white-louvered box on the side of his house above Pinetop and peers inside at three thermometers. A small flashlight hangs on the side for darker mornings.

The top thermometer is alcohol-based and records the minimum temperature for the past 24 hours. The middle thermometer uses mercury and produces the maximum temperature. A third thermometer gives Granfelt another minimum temperature reading.

If it has rained, Granfelt checks the gauge off to the side, using a ruler calibrated to detect as little as one-hundredth of an inch. If it has snowed, Granfelt measures the depth on a board and later melts the snow to determine water content.

All of these readings he records faithfully in a small pocket daybook. He calls the National Weather Service office in Bellemont, west of Flagstaff, and reports his findings. At the end of each month, he enters the figures in an official form that he sends to the weather service.

"It's like milking a cow," Granfelt said. "It's something you do every day. You've got to keep the record. Somebody has to do it."

Granfelt moved to eastern Arizona in 1967 to work as a range conservationist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Part of his work required him to monitor evaporation rates at several sites of interest to the White Mountain Apache Tribe and Salt River Project.

One of those sites was Hawley Lake, a mountain reservoir not far from the White River. It sits at 8,200 feet above sea level, but still down in a natural bowl where cold air slides downslope and pools, nudging temperatures lower even than some places higher in elevation.

Granfelt had been in Arizona less than a year when two snowstorms battered Arizona and dumped more than 100 inches at Hawley Lake. The final measurement of 91 inches, taken after the snow had settled, remains the state record for total snow depth.

Three years later, Granfelt heard about a second record at Hawley Lake, one for low temperature. The reading was taken by a trained observer at the lake, using the proper equipment — a lesson in the value of doing things right.

"The reasons sounded mundane, but people needed to know these things," he said. "Contractors needed to know the rainfall because if there was too much on a given day, it wouldn't count against their contract. There is a purpose to keeping records."

More than a decade later, Granfelt installed his home weather station and joined the weather service volunteer observer corps, reporting data from the McNary 2 North station. Back then, most of the weather data was recorded by hand.

These days, the weather service increasingly relies on automated stations, which Granfelt finds disheartening.

"Some places, they had 100 years of records kept by members of a single family," he said. "Now, if they lose an observer, nobody wants to do it."

There's no pay for observers, no glory beyond the occasional service award, but every so often, you're a part of history. Maybe you're there at the coldest place in Arizona.

"You have to give a damn," he said. "I figure somebody's got to do it. Why not me?"

The changing season

Paul Allen remembers some cold and snowy days in the 35 years since he moved from Phoenix to Pinetop. A snowstorm seven or eight years ago piled four feet of snow on the town, deep enough that he had to use a tractor to clear enough space for his snowplow.

The coldest day he can recall was a few years ago, when the temperature plunged to minus 19.

"It's not unusual to hit zero once or twice, but it doesn't last long," he said. "Storms blow in, we get winter weather for a day and a half and then the sun is back out. I guess you could say it's a dry cold."

Allen owns the Whispering Pines Resort, 36 rental cabins on 14 acres a short hike from Woodland Lake. Like most tourist businesses in Pinetop, the resort is most often booked during the summer months, when people want to escape the heat. Skiers and snowboarders come and go during the winter.

"I think some people who come up here are surprised we have pine trees and mountains," Allen said "The perception is Arizona is the desert and the Grand Canyon. We're a four-season community. Winter is just another season."

Recent winters seem to have suffered the effects of a regional drought, Allen said, but before that, he saw signs that the seasons were changing in different ways.

"In the '80s, when my kids were born, I don't remember a Halloween we weren't trick-or-treating in the snow," he said. "In the '90s, it was 50-50 whether we'd have snow. By the 2000s, it was virtually never."

But before that, there was snow. And cold.

Mercury falling

Stan Bryte had clocked in for his daily shift at the National Weather Service in Phoenix on the morning of Jan. 7, 1971, when his boss, the chief meteorologist, buzzed him.

"You need to get up to Hawley Lake," he told Bryte. "I have a suspicion this is going to be a real record."

Hawley Lake was one of the remote weather stations Bryte supervised from Phoenix. He worked with a local weather observer, the manager of the lake's lodge and store, who reported conditions daily. The site had an updated set of thermometers; Bryte prided himself on keeping his observers properly equipped.

Not much more than three years earlier, Hawley Lake had posted a state record for snowfall, 91 inches on the ground after a weeklong storm that had paralyzed much of northern Arizona. Was the remote site about to enter the books with a second record?

Bryte packed up his own set of thermometers and other instruments that he would use to calibrate the Hawley Lake equipment, a required step before a state record could be certified.

Christmas 1970 had passed without much snow across the White Mountains, but a potent cold front surged into Arizona with the new year and drove the state deep into winter.

Snow piled up at the start of the week, 10 inches at Greer, a foot above Pinetop, two feet at the base of the Sunrise ski resort and more than four feet at the top. When the snow stopped, the temperatures plunged. Minus 14 at St. Johns, minus 18 at Alpine, minus 21 at Springerville.

One day, then two, then three. Pipes began to burst, cutting off supplies of water, oil and gas. Vehicles wouldn't start. The White Mountain Eagle in Show Low reported a car fire when a man tried to heat up an engine with a light bulb. And worse:

"Rabbits, even in a covered cage, were reported frozen to death," the newspaper wrote.

At Hawley Lake, 22 inches of snow fell on Jan. 3 and 4. Temperatures slid rapidly. Minus 31, minus 34 and, on Jan. 6, minus 39.

On the morning of Jan. 7, 1971, the caretaker for the lodge and store and roads that led to the cabins, trudged past the old post office and pried open the wooden shelter that housed the official thermometers. A pal and sometimes resident, a retired Marine Corps general, accompanied the caretaker.

In the year or so before, the weather service had approved several changes to the weather station. Winds blowing across the lake sometimes shook the wooden shelter enough to dislodge a thermometer, ruining the day's readings. The station was remounted on a post and the thermometers attached to the post, eliminating the wind buffeting.

More importantly, Bryte had replaced the thermometers. The one used to measure minimum temperatures was made for colder conditions and would register temperatures farther below zero than is typical in Arizona.

Bryte pulled into the parking lot for the lodge and went about his work. When he was through, he confirmed the caretaker's initial report.

The site had set a state record with a calibrated reading of minus 40 degrees, three degrees colder than the old record, set in 1963 at Fort Valley outside Flagstaff and at a station near the eastern Arizona ghost town of Maverick.

Hawley Lake had become the coldest place in Arizona.

Forty-four years later, perched on a stool in his Fountain Hills kitchen, Bryte recalled his trip to the White Mountains, one of his regular stops on summertime tours of weather stations.

"At the time, I don't think it was a big deal, the Hawley Lake record," he said. "Later it was. I just knew what I had to go up and verify that not only was the thermometer accurate, that the observer had read it correctly."

Bryte scratched the ears of Nash, the mixed-breed retriever (named for the former Phoenix Sun Steve) who was angling for a ride in the car. "I took care of my stations. I visited my observers and upgraded the equipment when I could. I knew was going to get the best information from them."

The coldest place

Jan Bachmeyer and Kate Schulze paddled their red kayaks back ashore and pulled them toward a waiting pickup. The two women had driven over from Lakeside and found almost no one else on the water. The weather was good, the temperature in the high 70s, so the day was a success.

A hundred yards down the shore and around a spit of land, Fernando Carroll and his family were trying their luck at fishing. The lake levels were low, Carroll noted, because of work on the dam, but the fishing was still good.

Hawley Lake was once a different place. Its cabins, some of them elaborately hugging the shore, drew seasonal residents who kept the store and a small snack bar busy.

Today, most of the cabins sit empty, the leases never renewed by the tribe.

For more than 20 years, the wooden weather station stood near the old post office on one end of the lake, its readings monitored by an observer until 1985. For three more years, the weather service maintained an automated station.

Then, in 1988, it closed for good.

In its brief history, the station produced two state records: total snow depth and minimum temperature. Both have endured. The temperature record is particularly difficult to duplicate because Hawley Lake sits in that bowl, where cold air collects.

In the years since, a few places have come close. The Grand Canyon fell to minus 30 in 2010 and minus 29 in 2011. Flagstaff reached minus 30 degrees in 1981 and minus 28 in 1987. But for many towns in the high country, the coldest temperature records carry the year 1971.

Granfelt, the Pinetop weather observer whose work on watersheds in 1971 often took him to Hawley Lake, marvels today at the fact that the record exists.

"For a commercial thermometer to have a reading that low, for the changes they made on the shelter," he said, "it was a bunch of fortuitous circumstances. That and we had a good observer."