We’ve all heard our share of folklore style winter predictions. There’s one about wooly worms bearing a smaller orange stripe ahead of especially snowy winters, another about tough apple skins forewarning of a drier season, and some say beavers are especially active ahead of what they predict will be a long winter. There are more scientific means, of course—long-range forecasts, trends of previous La Nina and El Nino cycles—all of which feel a little dubious. But do you know whose localized winter weather predictions are usually on point? A plow driver who’s spent most of his career clearing the road to Mt. Baker Ski Area, WA.
“I think it’s going to be a good year, maybe even another one like the record winter in ‘98,” Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) plow driver Theo Donk predicts, almost too casually. It’s unclear what kind of forecasting tools, special powers or wizardry he has up his sleeve—you could call it Theo’s Almanac, maybe. Anyways, if I had to choose who to listen to on snow predictions, I’m listening to this guy.
WSDOT employees Dan Larson, Theo Donk, Ric Willand, Conner Rounds and Dillon De Boer acquiesce to a group photo outside the Shuksan station in early November.
The WSDOT Shuksan station, located at the intersection of Twin Lakes Road and SR 542, aka Mt. Baker Highway.
We’re at WSDOT's Shuksan station on Washington’s SR 542, at the base of the many switchbacks that climb from the Nooksack River drainage to Mt. Baker Ski Area. It’s dumping out—rain for now, but within the week it’ll be snow, and lots of it. Theo’s predictions are already boding well.
Theo has spent two decades of his career working out of the WSDOT Shuksan station. Now nearing retirement after 40 years on the job, currently serving as the Northwest Region Area 1 Superintendent for WSDOT in Bellingham, he sometimes comes to hang at his old stomping grounds near Baker.
A handful of other drivers are scattered around the room this morning, mostly donning some combination of workwear, hi-vis vests and logos for various heavy machinery companies. They hold chattering radios and battered coffee mugs.
Public Information Officer, Madison Sehlke, and WSDOT’s Northwest Region Area 1 Superintendent, Theo Donk, chat inside the Shuksan station, built in the early 1940s. Theo was quick to point out the wood paneling in the main room of the station, that had been milled from old growth Doug fir from the Nooksack valley.
Lead Technician Dillon De Boer at the Shuksan station. Dillon is pointing to images from a particularly memorable storm in February 2017 that brought six feet of snow in four days. The storm left dozens of trees and branches scattered across Highway 542 and kept the WSDOT staff at the station and working on the road for two straight weeks.
Outside, the rain is bordering on torrential, the Nooksack is swollen with mud and debris, and one of the five on-duty plow drivers is up at the ski area clearing the “slushy mess” that had been accumulating all morning. Snow levels are hovering around 4200 feet. The four other on-shift WSDOT drivers are here, sipping coffee and biding time until the real storms arrive. Within the week, they’ll have over six new feet of snow to contend with to prepare for opening day on November 20. They can’t wait.
“The days I look forward to the most up here are the ones where I pour my coffee out full at the end of the shift, because my hands were too busy to take a drink the entire day,” Dillon De Boer, the lead technician at the Shuksan station tells me later. Turns out, plow drivers like pow days just as much as we do, especially when the snow comes in below 28 degrees; road conditions take a turn for the worse above 28 degrees and avoiding cars in ditches while also trying to clear a mountain road in rough conditions is a good way to have a bad time. But a cold morning after a 20+ inch storm? That’s not just a dream for skiers and riders—plow operators eat it up too.
“I don’t think people should be able to get paid to have this much fun,” Ric Willand, maintenance supervisor for the Shuksan station, says. “When you wake up at 3:30 am, open the blinds, look across the road and see two feet of snow hanging on the limbs of the trees, you know it’s going to be a good day.”
Most people don’t know what goes into the average winter day of maintaining 542—probably the “sketchiest” (their word, not mine) road that stays open through the winter in Washington State. An average storm day begins at 3:30 am and usually requires 8-10 hours in the seat of a plow or blower, driving 200-300 miles a day up and down the same road on lanes less than a foot wider than their equipment. Rinse and repeat for four back-to-back, 10-hour shifts a week, sometimes more if needed. They aren’t just drivers, either; the guys (the crew is all men this season) are cleaners and cooks, grocery-getters and mechanics. They eat meals together, go on hikes together and sleep in bunk rooms upstairs, which all spill out into a central, apparently communal space that houses only one thing: an inversion table for back pain.
“You’re sitting in seats that have been sat in for four thousand hours every season for 18 years,” Dillon says, standing next to the inversion table. “Then you add in a rough road, a plow, 6,000 pounds of sand and a 35,000-pound truck. You’re just getting your butt kicked, all day, every day.”
The new “Chewie”—the name Mt. Baker’s local skiers and riders have given the WSDOT snow blowers over the years—sits at the ready for the first big storm of the season. This blower is only two seasons old and will replace an older Chewie, that’s being retired after 20 years on the job.
Their shifts include the obvious stuff like removing snow, but also regularly include cutting downed trees out of the road, avoiding collisions with cars taking corners too wide or fast, and thoughtfully dispersing sand on the switchbacks, so maybe that driver going too fast won’t lose it into a snowbank (or worse). With the Shuksan station using up to 10 million pounds per season, Theo jokes that they use “about one Daytona Beach” worth of sand during super snowy years. The rest of their time is spent maintaining the equipment, making meals and getting enough rest to do it all over again the next day—especially during long storm cycles.
That road that we all rely on for recreation—winter or summer—is more fragile than many of us realize. It’s fragile, in a sense, from a structural standpoint—the road from Maple Falls to the Shuksan station mostly parallels the Nooksack River, meaning portions of it are periodically taken out by shifts in the river’s channel during big storms. And the road from Shuksan station to Artist Point was largely built in the 1920s, atop what was effectively logging slash. It’s a testament to 20th century American cojones, sure, but it’s also a road built 100 years ago, when the population of Whatcom County was 1/5th what it is now, and when excitedly driving to the mountain in the worst conditions imaginable with 4000 other people wasn’t really a concept yet.
“Whatcom is the fastest growing county in Washington, but the thing that’s not growing is this road,” Theo says of 542. “The chain-up areas were built in the 1960s—now, we have 20 times more traffic.”
Highway 542 is a special road and provides easy access to all the benefits of the alpine without really having to work that hard for it. But it wouldn’t be possible without these folks who are dedicated to keeping it open, day in and out—plowing the road in 35,000-pound trucks, on narrow, snow-covered, cliff-adjacent roads, with nothing but hours-old coffee, aching backs and beach-loads worth of sand.