Above 6,000 feet or so the land is heavy with wet snow, melting and seeping and getting ready to run down to the basins and inspire wildflowers in a few months.

The state's few major dailies are full of news about would-be snow revelers being turned away from Snow Bowl in Flagstaff, which opened a few days ago after a series of winter storms hit the state around Christmas.  The parking lots around the sacred mountains that loom over Flag were full early in the day, much to the disappointment of thousands of snow-seekers who made the trip up from Phoenix and elsewhere.  One news story said that rangers were turning people away from wildcat sled runs in the Coconino National Forest (public land, mind you--as is the majority of the land in Arizona).  The rangers reportedly said there were "liability" issues involved, and directed people to a sanctioned snow-play area at the base of the San Francisco Peaks which, alas, was full to capacity by early in the day as well.  

Down here in Southern Arizona, we've had a week or so of intermittent rain storms that have kept things cool and gloomy on the desert since a few days before Christmas.  Rain in the basin usually means snow on the range, and so it was that a foot or more of the white stuff fell on the Santa Catalina Mountains above Tucson, causing the nation's southernmost ski run, Ski Valley on Mount Lemmon, to actually open to skiers and snowboarders.  

An Arizona Roamer correspondent made the trip up the Sky Island Highway to Mount Lemmon on Sunday, a warm winter day in the desert with a cloudless blue sky.  Everybody else in the Old Pueblo had the same idea, apparently.  Our correspondent reported that it took two long hours to make the bumper-to-bumper drive down the mountain, a drive that usually takes less than an hour.  There were thousands of Tucsonans and even Nogalians and probably even Sonorans up there on the mountain--"the most people that have ever been on Mt. Lemmon at one time," our correspondent guessed.

In the state's midlands, the mountains around Prescott are covered with snow, but Prescott itself is only soggy and slushed from the sun now.  When we were growing up there in the pinelands around Prescott, a few times every winter we would load up our sleighs and rise on skinny, icy roads up to Groom Creek or some other higher point in the Prescott National Forest; and we sled where we wanted to sled, and there was nobody around talking about the liability.