Weather, for many, is an innocuous topic reserved for filling dead air.
For Jeff Givens, it’s the subject of his favorite hobby and an underserved area of news in Southwest Colorado.
To love Colorado is to love weather – particularly the snow – but, Givens said, the San Juan Mountains are somewhat beyond the reach of accurate predictions by the National Weather Service.
So four years ago, Givens, 52, created the Facebook page Durango Snow Lovers as a forum to track weather patterns and share the news in detail with his followers, who have amassed to nearly 2,000.
With daily posts, exchanges with followers and Facebook “likes” that grow by as many as 100 each time a storm sweeps through the valley, Givens has become Durango’s sort of alternative weather guy.
“I have a love for weather which goes back to when I was a kid growing up in Iowa,” said Givens, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker by trade. “Nothing there is not affected by the weather.”
When he was 11, Givens’ parents bought a vacation home in Vail, which was his first experience with the rugged Rocky Mountains. He fell in love with the state, and moved to the Front Range in 1993, later living in the mountains just west of Denver at 10,000 feet.
At that time, emerging online technology was announcing a new era of weather tracking. Givens taught himself to use it, and soon he learned there is meteorology, and there is mountain meteorology, where terrain and altitude are more susceptible to the whims of the elements.
When Givens and his wife moved to Durango in April 2008, he saw the storms the San Juans were capable of producing – and how isolated the region is from weather reporting stations. But, when he started Durango Snow Lovers in 2012, he had little ambition other than finding an outlet for his preoccupation, and to placate his wife.
“She got sick of me talking about the weather all the time,” Givens said. “She said, ‘Talk to someone who cares.’”
He did, to the extent that eventually locals began turning to Givens when they wanted to know the forecast, and his followers increased with the frequency of his posts.
Animated and colloquial, his reports sometimes call out the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, as well as The Durango Herald, for its weather reporting.
And his followers, many of whom found Snow Lovers through real estate business with Givens, watch the page attentively when inclement weather is on the move.
“It provided a service that didn’t exist,” Givens said. “Grand Junction admittedly has a tough time with how to interpret Durango weather. There are no radar sites here. The San Juans are kind of forgotten in the shadow of the central and northern mountains.”
Sometimes Givens said he contacts the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, which did not comment for this story, to notify the agency of off-base predictions, or exchange information.
“What tends to happen, the NWS talks about the central and northern mountains, and you don’t hear anything about here, or there’s no follow-through,” Givens said. “They leave people hanging, and people have just kind of gotten used to it.”
On slow weather days, Givens might invest 10 minutes in posting. When storms are moving through, he dedicates hours before and during, gathering weather updates and reporting what he finds, as he did during the 2015 Christmas snowstorm that dumped more than a foot of snow on Durango.
Givens subscribes to weather services and sites including WeatherBell Analytics, follows forecast discussions from Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona National Weather Service offices, and primarily conducts business through a tablet or desktop computer. He has no radar, no fancy equipment, and he’d rather invest in his own reporting mechanism than join the NWS network of trained storm spotters.
“Right now, I have to treat this as a hobby,” Givens said. “There’s a lot more I want to do,” such as develop a website, shoot live video and partner with local broadcasters.
