Colorado history

Sunday, September 13, 2026

The National Guard starts hauling Lyons out of the St. Vrain, Mile High gets a September snow day, and a Utah kid who would invent mixed climbing is born.

The rain lets up and Colorado starts lifting people out of the water

2013 · Lyons / Boulder County / Front Range

On Friday, Sept. 13, 2013, the unrelenting Front Range rain finally eased. The water did not. Before dawn the Big Thompson had closed Interstate 25. By evening seven Army and National Guard helicopters, plus private ships, were pulling people off ridges that no longer had roads.

Governor John Hickenlooper signed a disaster emergency that morning covering fourteen Front Range and plains counties. In Lyons the first National Guard convoy lurched out after daybreak, high-clearance trucks fording what used to be streets. By 6 p.m. more than 550 people had been moved to dry ground and buses for Longmont. Jamestown was already a helicopter town. Fort Carson Black Hawks joined the Guard the same day.

The week had already broken Boulder's wettest-day record with 9.08 inches on the 12th. Statewide the September flood would kill eight people, damage about 19,000 homes, destroy more than 1,500, and tear out dozens of highway bridges. Officials later called the airlift the largest since Hurricane Katrina.

Sept. 13 is the date Colorado switched from enduring the storm to counting what it had taken. Lyons would stay cut off for days. U.S. 34 in Big Thompson Canyon was scoured to bedrock. The helicopters kept flying.

Sources: Denver Post — Lyons evacuation · Colorado Encyclopedia — September 2013 Floods · U.S. Army — more than 2,100 rescued · NWS Boulder — Sept. 2013 flood briefing

Denver goes from 92 degrees to a snowed-out Rockies game

1993 · Mile High Stadium / Denver

On Sept. 13, 1993, Denver measured 5.4 inches of snow and a record low of 33 degrees. The day before it had been 92. The expansion Rockies were supposed to host Houston at Mile High. The flakes had other plans.

Heavy, wet snow swirled through the old stadium on the South Platte. Twenty-four hours earlier the city had been in short sleeves. The official Stapleton observation logged 5.4 inches, still the snowiest Sept. 13 on the books, and 0.64 inches of liquid, the wettest. The low of 33 degrees is the date record. A National Weather Service meteorologist who was a Boulder high-school junior that week still quotes the swing: 92 on the 12th, accumulating snow on the 13th.

The Rockies and Astros were iced out. Welcome to baseball in Colorado, the wire stories said, as if the franchise needed a mascot other than thin air. September here has always been a negotiation. You pack the fleece next to the sunscreen and pretend that is normal.

The flakes melted. The calendar kept the punch line. Denver's Sept. 13 high record is 96, set in 1990 and matched in 2018. The same date has also done 33 and a snow day. That is not a contradiction. That is the Front Range explaining itself.

Sources: Washington Post — Astros-Rockies iced by snow · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 13 records · Seattle Times / NWS Boulder — 92 to 5.4 inches

Jeff Lowe is born, then teaches Colorado how to climb frozen water

1950 · Ouray / Telluride / Vail

Jeffery George Lowe was born Sept. 13, 1950, in Ogden, Utah. He spent the useful part of his career in Colorado: first ascent of frozen Bridal Veil Falls above Telluride, the Ouray Ice Festival, and a Vail mixed route that basically invented a sport.

Lowe started climbing with his father at six and stood on the Grand Teton at seven. He worked winters for Colorado Outward Bound so the summers stayed free for first ascents. In 1974 he and Mike Weis climbed the 365-foot frozen column of Bridal Veil Falls outside Telluride, a line that told American climbers waterfall ice was a real thing. In 1985 he put up Bird Brain Boulevard in Ouray. In 1994, on Octopussy outside Vail, he dry-tooled rock to reach a hanging dagger of ice. Guidebooks still treat that pitch as the birth certificate of modern mixed climbing.

He also built the room. Lowe helped start the Ouray Ice Festival in 1996, got ice climbing into the Winter X Games, and co-founded Lowe Alpine with his brothers. He soloed a new line on the Eiger's north face in winter, Metanoia, without bolts. The American Alpine Club gave him its honorary lifetime membership. Boulder put him in its sports hall of fame in 2017.

A neurological illness that behaved like ALS took eighteen years. He died Aug. 24, 2018, in Fort Collins. Ouray still hangs ice in the gorge every winter and throws a festival in his honor. The water freezes. People climb it. That was the joke he spent a life making serious.

Sources: Wikipedia — Jeff Lowe · Climbing magazine — ice and mixed pioneer · Jeff Lowe's Metanoia — bio