Historic Hood River
Ice Storm
3-14-2012
Notes
Our County Forester characterized last month’s ice storm as a “35-40 year storm.” As luck would have it, we just ran across this image which seems to be from the winter of 1972-73: 39 years ago. Fortunately our recent storm largely spared the orchards. These folks were not so lucky. A picture after the storm cleared verifies this orchard was a total loss.
Charlott
Do we know who the unfortunate orchardist was? He could have made up a little bit of the loss by selling fire wood.
l.e.
I think it was 1916, that an ice storm damaged so many of the apple orchards in the area.
The orchards replanted to pears and smaller apple trees.
Charlott
It was 1919 that the majority of the apple trees were totally wiped out in Hood River. My great-grandfather and grandfather lost most everything. It was devestating for those orchardists as it take so many years for the new one to be of productive size.
Shellman
I recall my mother telling me about a bad ice storm in January of 1970 that took out a lot of orchard trees.
Greg
There was a rather major ice storm in the valley during the winter of 69-70. I particularly remember all the broken tops in the red fir trees near Dee and on up the lake branch road. This area suffered the same results again in the January 2012 ice storm.
Arthur
This film was processed in 1972, but there’s no way to be sure when the images were shot– could easily be winter of 69-70. I know I’ve left film in a drawer or camera several years before processing it.
Lesa
72-73 was the year my folks moved to Block House, near Goldendale, in Klickitat Co., It was a record setting cold winter. My dad managed a ranch there. We recorded temperatures on the farm at 30 below. We had a heater stuck under the hood of the pickup truck, or it wouldn’t start. We had to bring all of the cattle in from the outer fields, because we found some with their breath frozen so bad, we had to beat it off their mouths with a stick. Our own breath stuck to our scarves leaving big circles of ice and even with the heater going full blast inside our truck, there was ice on the insides of the windows. The big old farm house where we lived, had single pane windows, and even the window next to the wood stove, had ice on the inside. I thought that year it would never warm up, and it was some dickens trying to hand milk the cows.