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Man recounts tumbleweed storm caught on video

Posted at 9:37 PM, Nov 25, 2018
and last updated 2018-11-25 23:37:05-05

SUGAR CITY – It looked like a scene out of a movie like The Wizard of OZ or The Neverending Story.  The arrival of a powerful cold front Saturday afternoon brought thousands of tumbleweeds blown by 60 mile per hour winds, cloaked in thick dust.  Travis Wolfe braved the storm to capture it on video.

“Tumbleweeds were flying,” Wolfe said from his property just west of Sugar City in Crowley County.  “They were almost hitting me and stuff.  I had safety glasses on to keep me from getting hit (in the eyes).”

Wolfe’s video shows tumbleweeds blowing at high rates of speed in a north-south direction down the one-lane road he lives on just north of Lake Meredith.  “The road was actually completely covered over, and then when the wind hit, they were just rolling down the road,” Wolfe said.  Several times during the 53-second video, originally posted on the Facebook Group “Now THAT’S Colorado!,” Wolfe appears to get hit by the thorny tumbleweeds, some nearly the size of a man.  “They get pretty big, almost six feet tall,” Wolfe said while holding one intact dried Russian Thistle.

Wolfe’s video received tens of thousands of views after it was posted on the KOAA 5 Facebook page Saturday night.  He says the sudden attention is unusual, but not unwelcome, for the man who claims to only have ten Facebook friends and only utilizes the site for news and information.

Getting rid of the piled-up tumbleweeds can be challenging.  Wolfe says he just uses a pitchfork to hoist them back into the air, letting the wind handle it from there.  “I mean, I don’t have no neighbors, so they weren’t going in my neighbor’s yard,” Wolfe said.