In eastern Colorado, the Continental Divide makes a great sweep to the East at 40 degrees latitude, where Arapahoe Peak towers only thirty miles from the Great Plains. This bend funnels the great westerly winds, which pile up there and fall over a mile to the prairie, picking up speed as they drop. The ghost town of Caribou, which I visited in our recent story “Snow Hiking in Colorado High Country,” is just below Arapahoe Peak, and the wind howls through town like a Banshee much of the winter.
