The Cult of the Mountain-Town Weatherman

On a Sunday afternoon in October, I snuck out for a run. It was tank-top weather when I left my house in downtown Durango, Colorado, and I expected it to hold. I drove north into the mountains, and as I crested a hill 15 minutes in, the sky turned gray and cracked with lightning. The temperature reading in my car dropped 20 degrees, and the rain hitting the windshield was so thick I could hardly see the road. My phone buzzed in the cupholder. It was a text from the friend I was meeting: “WTF, DWG.”

DWG stands for Durango Weather Guy, the nom de plume of Jeff Givens, a local real estate agent turned amateur meteorologist who has much more power over my life than anyone running a WordPress blog should. His website offers weather forecasts, blow-by-blows of storms, and roundups of precipitation totals—with a heavy dose of personal opinion. Sometimes the posts are excited updates: “Saturday 4:30 am: It’s not over yet! The closed low-pressure is spinning over Arizona early this morning.” Sometimes he’ll take a deep dive into the variability of La Nina, the cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to bring dry winters to the Southwest, or the difference between Canadian and European forecasting models. Sometimes he’ll answer requests from fans who ask for specific forecasts within their individual microclimate. In the forecast the day after my Sunday soaking, Givens walked back what he’d posted the day before, responding to the razzing he’d received from readers. You don’t get that from the Weather Channel.

Followers who subscribe to his email list might get three updates a day when storms are firing, sometimes time-stamped 3 A.M., 9 A.M., then noon. I read every one. And I’m not alone. Givens has 19,100 subscribers. The local population is about 19,500, and that includes children.

Givens is more accurate than any other weather source around here, and that makes him arguably the biggest celebrity in my smallish town. Our collective excitement crescendos with his forecasts, and whether they lead to joyful or disappointing experiences outside, we piece together a postmortem in the days that follow. Sometimes he sends the whole town into a spiral. Like any forecaster, occasionally he’s wrong. I’m on multiple ski-planning text chains that dissect his accuracy. “He never admits when he’s wrong,” one friend complained. “I just don’t like his syntax,” another told me, while her husband admitted to obsessively reading every post. “Too many emails!” several others said. “How can you get mad at him, he’s doing it for free,” someone countered.

He is a common denominator: a folk hero and a prophet and the person to blame when your plans go to shit. Everyone I know has an opinion about his forecasts. And I mean literally everyone.

Yesterday at the doctor, as I shivered in my gown, the nurse asked me how the weather had been on the way over. “Durango Weather Guy says it’s supposed to get bad this weekend,” she said, unprompted.

I needed to understand how this faceless man had become a ubiquitous and mercurial guru—and wormed his way into the brains and hearts of my community. So I emailed Givens and asked him to meet up.

It’s not just my town that’s fascinated by the people who predict the weather. Meteorologists are some of the public’s most trusted sources for news, more than any other figure in print and TV reporting, according to a 2022 poll from The Economist and market research company YouGov. Most broadcast meteorologists have at least a bachelor’s degree in the field. But in tricky pockets where the Weather Channel struggles to get it right, people like me are turning to locals who may not be formally credentialed.

It’s hard to forecast the weather correctly in funky geographies. “Mountains generally create more extreme weather, and the variability in conditions is high over short distances,” Joel Gratz, the founder of Open Snow, tells me. “Valleys are different than summits, one side of a mountain will be different than another. The forecasting technology is less accurate in varied terrain.”

If you live in Durango, the local National Weather Service forecasting center is in Grand Junction, 150 miles and four mountain passes away. Because of the curvature of the earth, the Doppler radar can’t see weather in Durango coming in below 28,000 feet or so. Most storms sneak in under that horizon. This is where someone like Givens comes in.

Durango Weather Guy is far from the only small-town weather guru with a cult following. In Park City, a financial planner named Michael Ruzek tracks what he calls the Powder Buoy, a NOAA weather-tracking float nearly 200 miles off the coast of Kauai. When the buoy rises, he tells his 45,000 Instagram followers to plan for a powder day in the Wasatch in about two weeks. (He says that historically he’s been right around 80 percent of the time.) In Whistler, meteorologist David Jones, also known as the Powder Picker, posts high-energy video predictions for thousands of skiers in the Coast Range. And at Open Snow, Gratz has made a business by building a network of independent, often nontraditionally trained local weather forecasters—like Bryan Allegretto, who was working as an accountant in Tahoe before he started Tahoe Weather Discussion in 2007 and merged with Open Snow in 2011. He sends the Tahoe area into a frenzy when he predicts a big storm. In Utah, Gratz scooped up Evan Thayer, another amateur meteorologist who started a weather blog after the forecasting emails he sent to friends started circulating to hundreds of people.

Outdoorsy residents in places like Mammoth and Durango may end up in a particularly close parasocial relationship with their local weatherperson because the weather they predict has a big impact on their lives. If you prioritize being outside, especially if you live in a place where raging heat, big snowstorms, and wild monsoons are all common, your daily decisions and even your general psyche follow the curve of the weather forecast. We depend on it not just for recreation, but also as reassurance that the river will still run through the summer or the wildfire season might be mild.

This level of emotional investment may be why local weather gurus can at times evoke ire. Another legendary forecaster in Mammoth, named Howard Sheckter—a bootfitter who began writing local forecasts on the chalkboard of the ski shop where he worked in the eighties—once said that he was burned in effigy for getting forecasts wrong. But these individuals also inspire a unique devotion. When Sheckter, who eventually moved his forecasts onto an Eastern Sierra weather blog in the 2000s, passed away last August, fans in droves eulogized him online. “Howard was the only person really paying attention to our reality here,” local reporter Wendilyn Grasseschi wrote, “our unique challenges and issues that we all deal with due to our weather extremes.”

Once I’d made plans to meet up with DWG, I almost didn’t want to show. It felt like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.

My group chats had ideas of what he’d be like. “I bet he’s secretly some young tech bro,” one friend said. “I bet he has a fortress of screens in his basement. I’m picturing him like Homer Simpson at the nuclear plant,” said another.

On a gray morning three weeks after I got rained out, with the first real winter storm of the season rolling in, Givens met me for coffee. He walked in a couple of minutes after I did and settled in across the table from me. I almost missed him when he came in. He’s tall but unimposing, 60 years old, and soft-spoken—though he’s quick to answer questions, and maybe even a little nervous. He wore a crisp collared Hawaiian shirt while patrons wearing Patagonia and Ripton trickled into the coffee shop. He seemed like an avuncular math professor, the kind who wants you to do well but is a stickler for details and won’t let you off easy.

That Wizard of Oz turned out to be a real person—one who takes his volunteer role very seriously. I almost immediately felt bad for all the times I’d made snarky jokes about his accuracy. Givens told me that he runs his operation at home from an office where he sorts through various weather models on four different monitors. When I asked what they looked like, he ran out to his car to grab a tablet so he could show me the models he checks every morning, and sometimes in the middle of the night.

Before he was Durango Weather Guy, Givens was just a kid in Iowa obsessed with tornados and snowstorms. During his childhood, in the seventies, his family would come to Colorado to ski. He remembers being amazed by how much snow could fall so quickly.

He moved to Denver in 1992 for a job in investment banking, still intrigued by those storms. Several years later he and his wife, who he met right after he moved to Colorado, decamped for the edge of Echo Mountain in Idaho Springs, where the Front Range foothills transition to big mountains. They lived at 10,200 feet, and the local weather forecast never quite matched what he was seeing, so he taught himself to understand precipitation patterns by reading National Weather Service discussions online, where federal forecasters explain their predictions. “The good thing about those is that when there’s a weather term, they’ll highlight it and you can click on it and learn it. And if you’re passionate about it, you’ll remember it,” he told me. He was passionate—he memorized all the vocabulary, and then subscribed to various weather-data providers, like Weatherbell Analytics and Weather Models, pulling together details to make his own forecasts. He loved trying to figure out why some storms would hit and some would miss.

Eventually, he and his wife grew tired of Denver and sought out a quieter life in Durango. By 2010, after they had moved, he was driving his wife crazy with constant weather talk. She politely told him to direct it toward someone who cared. He began posting to Facebook. His audience grew quickly, especially after a 2018 wildfire burned 55,000 acres north of town and locals became more concerned about extreme weather. He set up the blog soon after.

Givens doesn’t ski anymore because of an old ankle injury, but he still has the obsessive focus of a stormchaser. In the coffee shop, he pulls up Weatherbell Analytics, one of the commercial forecasting services he uses, and pulls up a map that shows precipitation predictions in six-hour increments. He uses these maps to see how fronts move over the mountains and deposit moisture. I watch blobs of color—modeled storms—move across the screen, blanketing Utah and Arizona. He says that since he started looking at weather, the availability of data and models has increased exponentially. Amateurs like him now have access to incredibly high-resolution maps. The challenge is interpreting all that information.

“It’s not fancy, but it works, because I cover such a small area,” Givens said. “If someone asks me what’s happening in Aspen, I’m not even going to try.” He covers a quadrant that stretches east from the desert town of Cortez, Colorado, to often snow-hammered Wolf Creek Pass, and extends north from Aztec, New Mexico, through Telluride to Ridgway, Colorado. That zone encompasses most of the southern San Juan Mountains, including some of the most weather-prone passes in the country. The elevation ranges from 14,308-foot Uncompahgre Peak to the dry desert of northern New Mexico 10,000 feet lower. It’s a lot to be familiar with, from a forecasting perspective, because the terrain changes so fast. The model he shows me analyzes one nine-by-nine-mile square at a time. “Around here that makes a big difference,” he said, gesturing at his screen.

Learning the intricacies of local terrain and storm timing took years—and he’s still mastering it. “Early on I would watch storms coming from the north, but I eventually learned that it’s a southwest flow that delivers the biggest storms here,” he said. The nearby ski destination of Telluride can benefit from northwest flow, he said, but for the rest of the region that pattern “just kind of dries out and the wind blows like crazy.” Meteorology is pattern recognition, and Givens has become our most reliable local source because he’s memorized the trends.

Givens has a highly interactive relationship with the community. He shares information, and people respond with their own reports. “Every day that there’s a drop of rain or a flake of snow, I’ll get an email,” he told me. “When nothing is happening, I’ll still get 20 emails a day.” If he doesn’t post for a couple of days, and the weather is calm, he’ll get concerned messages. “I have a bunch of second moms out there,” he said. (Based on his interactions, he thinks that about 60 percent of his readers are women.) When youth sports teams have travel games, parents and coaches check his predictions before heading up the mountain passes, and people hire him to forecast for their weddings. He’s become inescapable, even from himself. “Sometimes when I go to the grocery store, I can hear people talking about me,” he said.

I asked him if he ever felt like people held him responsible when he got the forecast wrong. He laughed a little. “Not as responsible as I hold myself,” he said.

What started as a personal hobby has turned into a public service. Givens’s forecasts are accurate enough that it’s not just worried sports parents and weirdos with their own snow stakes who are checking in. He told me that the sheriff’s office and local search and rescue groups will ask for his outlook when they’re in the field. Regional avalanche forecasters and the Colorado Department of Transportation also make sure that he has their latest travel reports to include in his forecasts. “Now I get emails from the people who lock the gates on the passes [when they’re closed because of avalanche danger],” he said, referring to the Colorado Department of Transportation. “That’s handy.”

Planning around the weather as someone who’s active outdoors can feel both accessible and slightly mystical—we have predictions, but we can never fully get it right. Yet it’s reassuring to know that someone is closely monitoring the hyperlocal way the winds are blowing. Durango Weather Guy helps us manage one aspect of our uncertain future—he’s both a source of information and a scapegoat. And now that I’ve gone behind the curtain, I’ll take him for granted less.

By the time I was done with my coffee, patchy sunlight was pushing through the clouds. Givens rushed off. It was his wife’s birthday, plus there was a storm coming in. As he headed to his car, he said, “I have to get an afternoon forecast out today.”

Heather Hansman is the author of Powder Days and Down River. She’s a regular contributor to Outside.