It’s all been Tumbleweeds, all the time, in Utah and beyond
Saturday morning, residents of South Jordan, Utah, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City, woke up to an astonishing sight. Thousands of Tumbleweeds had blown into the city and piled up against people’s homes overnight.
Roads were blocked. Burying entire cars. In some cases, the tangles of tumbleweeds reached the rooflines or upper floor balconies of people’s homes, said Rachael Van Cleave, the city’s public information officer.
“It was a very beautiful sight to see,” she said. “They just rolled into a lot of our neighborhoods and blocked off houses, their front doors and their garages, 10 and maybe even 15 feet high.”
Winds of 70 to 80 miles per hour have been blowing across much of Utah for several days, peaking on Saturday. Tumbleweeds also blew en masse into the neighboring town of Eagle Mountain in southern Jordan, and across vast open areas and highways in Nevada and western Utah.
Before South Jordan was given its current name, the city was called Gale, “as in gale force winds,” Ms. Van Cleave said.
This week’s winds were part of the same cold front and storm that dumped 10 feet of snow on parts of California. In Utah, the tumbleweeds were quickly followed by snow starting Saturday evening.
Winter storms and their associated winds are common in Utah, but the strength of the recent winds was unusual, said Hayden Mahan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Salt Lake City. Several thousand homes lost power and area ski resorts closed, he said.
The wind also kicked up dust, reducing visibility at Salt Lake City airport and grounding incoming flights.
In Utah, as everywhere, climate change sometimes contributes to unusually strong or strange weather patterns, although this particular storm can’t necessarily be blamed on warming, says Jonathon Meyer, a climatologist at the Utah Climate Center.
One of the reasons Jordan City in particular has come under so much siege this week is because the city sits on what experts call the “wildland-urban interface” — a name given to places where things like neighborhoods and homes bump up against undeveloped land where more vegetation grows. The term is normally used when discussing forest fires, but tumbleweed invasions can occur in similar environments.
When asked whether communities along the urban border of the Salt Lake City region — currently overrun with tumbleweed — are also at risk of wildfires, Dr. Meyer “absolutely.”
Utah was the fastest growing state in the country as of the 2020 census, and South Jordan was one of the fastest growing cities. The area saw an additional influx of new residents looking for space and outdoor recreation during the coronavirus pandemic, and currently has a population of about 87,000. In 2010 the city had only about 50,000 inhabitants.
South Jordan’s wildland-urban interface creeps westward, where the city has annexed land previously owned by a copper mine and developed it into master-planned residential communities.
While this latest tumbleweed storm was particularly dazzling, the city is no stranger to the phenomenon of “tumblemageddon.” According to Mrs Van Cleave, it is the new district that is currently furthest west.
Tumbleweeds are dried, uprooted bushes of Russian thistle, an invasive species that came to North America in the 1870s. The plants have shallow roots and are adapted to dry out seasonally, popping out of the ground and tumbling in the wind to disperse their seeds.
The weekend’s events stunned the community, with residents taking out their snow shovels to help each other. “We had a bit of fun with it. We try to laugh at something that is so bizarre,” Ms. Van Cleave said.
They are still cleaning up the spiky mess. By late Tuesday, city workers had already made 25 trips to the landfill with dumpsters full of tumbleweeds.