Morning after morning for the past eight weeks, Mountain View County residents have woken to unseasonably rainy, cold mornings.
It has been more than 100 years since Central Alberta had a year without summer and two centuries since winter in July.
The great-grandfathers who farmed and ranched in Central Alberta in 1912 remember it and the following year of 1913 as years without summer.
Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders in the northwest also called 1816 a year without summer, with weather across British North America so severe with snow and frost that preachers called it heaven’s punishment for the War of 1812.
The reason for the cold summers in 1816 and 1912 were gigantic volcanoes in Alaska. Clouds of ash and debris rose into the atmosphere and spread southeast onto the Great Plains, over the Mississippi River, and into the southeastern United States.
The Alberta summer of 1883 was coolish, but less severe because of the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia which spread ash as far east as Europe, where it was noted more for the vivid sunrises and sunsets it caused than for the cooling effect on weather.
Alaska’s geological volcanic fire belt is on the Alaska Peninsula and the west shore of Cook Inlet.
There are 130 active volcanoes in Alaska that have erupted in the last two million years.
They are considered active mountains because geologists who study volcanoes think of two million years as “recent." If you marry a vulcanist, he may not wash the car in a hurry.
From June 6 to 9, 1912 the largest volcanic eruption in the world during the 20th century took place for two days on Mount Katmai (also called Novarupta). It hurled 30 cubic kilometres of ash and debris into the atmosphere. The emissions equalled the volume of 6,000 modern aircraft carriers per hour for 60 hours.
It created what scientists on the scene called The Valley of 10,000 Smokes for the endless vista of steaming fumaroles (mini-volcanoes) filling the basin with ash. The valley is now a tourist attraction.
The ash cloud filtered the sunlight and cooled off temperatures in Alberta, affecting harvest yields and giving rise to the name “the year with no summer.”
The summer of 1912 is better remembered for the six-day first Calgary Stampede in September than for the cold summer weather.
Several Canadian cowboys paid their entry fees with cash earned working on harvest crews that chilly summer.
The rodeo is remembered and the cold harvest season is forgotten.
Stampede co-founder Guy Weadick thought the Stampede would be a tribute to the end of the brief cowboy and open range era. Instead, he and his Big Four financiers ensured that the era would be remembered into the future.
Canadian poet Douglas Lepan wrote, “the end of an age and the end of an afternoon are one and the same to grinding fortune.”
Grinding fortune has not yet ended the cowboy age and the end of the afternoon with no summer has yet to come as long as July cold and rain calls back to mind the volcano summer of 1912.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
