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Massive dust storms hit southeast Colorado, evoking "Dirty Thirties" Read more:Massive dust storms hit southeast Colorado, evoking "Dirty Thirties"

By C. J. Refsland on June 9, 2013 • ( 1 )

LAMAR — Jillane Hixson stopped dusting her home about noon on a clear Friday and looked out the window to a storm roiling in the distance.

Small dust devils kicked up, and within moments, a punishing dust storm slammed into Hixson Farms at full force, trapping Hixson and her husband, Dave Tzilkowski, in their home for 15 hours to kick off the Memorial Day weekend.

“You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window,” said Hixson, a fifth-generation farmer whose land and home are 4 miles south of Lamar. “You know that it’s your crop that’s hitting the windows and blowing away, and it’s not just affecting you, but also everyone else.”

They raced to close the blinds and curtains — to minimize the thick

Dave Tzilkowski and his wife, Jillane Hixson, look out over their farm from their backyard. Their crop of wheat was damaged by the recent dust storm. “You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window,” said Hixson, a fifth-generation farmer whose property is 4 miles south of Lamar. “You know that it’s your crop that’s hitting the windows and blowing away, and it’s not just affecting you, but also everyone else.”(Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

fog of dirt seeping inside and to block the grim vision.

“You can’t stand to look at it,” she said. “It’s like a train wreck, looking a disaster full in the face.”

They paced and they prayed as 60 mph winds kept coming.

“At one point, the sand was pounding on the glass so hard, I didn’t know if it was hail or dirt,” she said.

By late evening, so much dirt was floating inside the house, they had to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.

“It was in your nose, on your tongue, in your eyes,” she said.

Hixson showered late that night but soon was covered with another layer of grime. They went to bed at 11 p.m., putting their heads under the blankets to shield them from the noise and the dirt, but they couldn’t really sleep. They moved from bedroom to bedroom trying to find some peace.

By the time they woke at 6 a.m. Saturday, the storm had passed.

They opened the front door and saw 3-foot drifts of dirt everywhere.

“We were shellshocked, almost immobilized by depression,” she said. “We were overwhelmed by the huge financial loss, and by the physical and emotional stress.”

Their spirits lifted when family from Denver arrived for the holiday weekend.

It took

A thick layer of dust covers a table inside Jillane Hixson’s home, south of Lamar, in the wake of a recent dust storm. (Jillane Hixson, Special to The Denver Post)

two days for the entire extended family, with the help of two tractors and a loader, to clear the fine brown grit.

The storm was the worst of seven that have scoured the farm since November, Hixson said.

“We had periods of blowing soils in the 1970s that required tractor work,” Tzilkowski said. “But this is ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dirt is almost all that people can talk about these days in communities along U.S. 50 and 287.

Photos of fierce dust storms rolling across the state’s Eastern Plains are showing up on Facebook and local TV news, harking to the Dust Bowl years that devastated southeastern Colorado in the 1930s.Farmers and ranchers are tolling their losses. People are praying for rain.

It’s the inevitable result of three seasons of extreme drought in the area — D4 this year, the worst on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale, and no relief in sight, said state climatologist Nolan Doesken.

“The first year, it was very dry, but there was still reasonable vegetative cover,” he said. “That started deteriorating last year, with more and more bare ground.”

For miles on either side of U.S. 287 between Kit Carson and Lamar, the earth is brown and bare during a season that should be bursting with green native grasses and wheat. Even weeds aren’t growing. Failed crops mean vast swaths of land with no roots to anchor parched topsoil.

“(Farmers and ranchers) are watching the clouds gather, and then they get nothing but dust storms,” Doesken said. “It’s very depressing.”

The conditions are taxing the financial ledgers and the creativity of people who make their living from the land.

On Wednesday at Hixson Farms, where 800 acres of wheat are already lost, workers were spreading 25 tons of manure to preserve topsoil on the 200 acres that were blowing the worst. It cost about $30,000 — and it’s just a gamble, because high winds may blow it all away.