(From Kay Johnson, Grand Chaplain ...)  You put interesting stuff in Stars and I thought maybe this would be of some interest.  I lived in Spearfish, South Dakota all my life (well, until I came to Washington, that is!)  I was just a kid when this happened but I remember my Mother talking about the sheets on the clothesline being frozen one minute and dripping the next (hmmm, does that date me?  No electric clothes dryer!)  Anyway . . .

Spearfish Weather Phenomenon

Temperature change is still a record … Weather phenomena is one for the books!

By Jan Kaus. Lawrence County Journal, Spearfish

    Black Hills residents have long used the phrase, "If you don't like the weather, wait a few minutes and it will change."  January 22, 1943, confirmed that thought.  That was the day Spearfish went down in the record books for the world's greatest variance in temperature - 49 degrees in just two minutes – when temperatures rose from minus 4 to 45 degrees above zero according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

    It happened at about 7:30 a.m., 65 years ago.

    While that statistic has been somewhat of a claim to fame for Spearfish, many people don't realize that the fluctuation continued throughout the day - and throughout the Black Hills Region.  After the drastic 2-minute climb, temperatures in Spearfish continued to rise. Then just after 9 a.m., temps dropped 60 degrees in the course of 20 minutes, from 55 degrees to 5 below. Less than an hour later, it had gone back up to 55 where it stayed for several hours. By around 4:30 p.m. it was 10 degrees, and the day ended at zero by midnight.

    "It was quite crazy," Jerry Junek of Spearfish recounted in a Journal interview before the 60th anniversary of the event. "You were cold one minute and hot the next."

    Junek had just returned home on furlough from the Army Air Force. "I got here the day before it happened, and I was only here four days."

    He said he remembered seeing the front rolling in and "wondering what the heck was going on."

    The late Joe Hargraves, a longtime Spearfish resident, had also shared memories about watching the winds move in that day.

    "The stuff came rolling in just like a big barrel - only it was rolling backwards," Hargraves said in a 60th anniversary interview. "It was a big long line as far as you could see in both directions - northwest and southeast. It looked just like fog except it was rolling."

    He said the wind was pushing it, coming in underneath the fog.  "It would raise up and turn back. It just kept doing that. We'd have that warm air and then all of a sudden it'd back up for 200 to 300 feet and then come back down again."

    Hargraves had watched the storm from his family's farm west of Spearfish on Crow Creek where he was out tending to the livestock with his parents.

    He said the cows had been in the cold for so long that when it turned warm they decided they wanted some exercise. "They started jumping and hopping, but all they could do was fall down." 

    It wasn't just Spearfish that was experiencing the bizarre weather conditions that memorable day.  Slightly less drastic changes began happening in the surrounding communities as the Chinook winds worked their way through the Hills. Sturgis and Rapid City saw the bouncing temperatures, which were especially dramatic near the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, according to a monthly weather review put out by the United States Department of Commerce.

    At 11 a.m. on the east side of the Hotel, winter was in full swing, while around the corner on the south side, not 50 feet away, it felt like spring.  and then winter . and then spring again.  Motorists were forced to park when a thick frost formed almost instantly on their windshields as the warm winds passed through.

    Walter Tetrault was living on a farm just north of Spearfish in 1943. Recounting the wacky weather in an interview a few years ago, Tetrault said he remembered leaving the farm in the morning when it was about 5 below zero.  

    "My sisters were leaving that day for Washington and we took them into town to catch the bus. We only drove a couple miles to get there, but things were thawing and it was in the 30s or warmer. It was very strange, but at that time we didn't realize it was the record it turned out to be."

    Tetrault said the temperatures kept changing until finally settling at one temperature - "cold."

    While the Chinook winds swept across higher elevations, like Lead, communities in the lower elevations remained cold - even communities three miles apart. When Lead hit 52 degrees that day, Deadwood stayed at a frigid 16 degrees below zero.

    But none of that made the Guinness Book.

    Junek said several people in the area think Frank Thompson of Spearfish was the one who contacted the Guinness Book company.

    Hargraves once appeared in a national television interview with Flip Wilson to talk about the freak occurrence. And years later, on the 44th anniversary of the event, Junek was interviewed on a Chicago radio station where he shared the story with the country. Junek even kept a copy of the Bristol Thermometer recording showing the temperatures throughout the day - a chart people watched with animation in the Montana-Dakota Utilities office window throughout the historic day. Junek's copy is signed by several witnesses ranging from a plumbing contractor, to a bank vice-president and a barber.

    Junek said it was even notarized so no one could question the legitimacy of it.  In the words of the late Hargraves', "There hasn't been a day so radical before or since that January day."

    The world record agrees.

    We went through Spearfish this past fall on our way to Mt. Rushmore!  Thanks, Kay, for an interesting article!

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