Durango Snow Lovers<\/a> as a forum to track weather patterns and share the news in detail with his followers, who have amassed to nearly 2,000.<\/p>\nWith daily posts, exchanges with followers and Facebook \u201clikes\u201d that grow by as many as 100 each time a storm sweeps through the valley, Givens has become Durango\u2019s sort of alternative weather guy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a love for weather which goes back to when I was a kid growing up in Iowa,\u201d said Givens, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker by trade. \u201cNothing there is not affected by the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he was 11, Givens\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
When Givens and his wife moved to Durango in April 2008, he saw the storms the San Juans were capable of producing \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe got sick of me talking about the weather all the time,\u201d Givens said. \u201cShe said, \u2018Talk to someone who cares.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt provided a service that didn\u2019t exist,\u201d Givens said. \u201cGrand 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat tends to happen, the NWS talks about the central and northern mountains, and you don\u2019t hear anything about here, or there\u2019s no follow-through,\u201d Givens said. \u201cThey leave people hanging, and people have just kind of gotten used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d rather invest in his own reporting mechanism than join the NWS network of trained storm spotters.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, I have to treat this as a hobby,\u201d Givens said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more I want to do,\u201d such as develop a website, shoot live video and partner with local broadcasters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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