On a Sunday afternoon in October, I snuck out for a run. It was tank-top weather when I left my house in downtown Durango, Colorado, and I expected it to hold. I drove north into the mountains, and as I crested a hill 15 minutes in, the sky turned gray and cracked with lightning. The temperature reading in my car dropped 20 degrees, and the rain hitting the windshield was so thick I could hardly see the road. My phone buzzed in the cupholder. It was a text from the friend I was meeting: “WTF, DWG.”
DWG stands for Durango Weather Guy, the nom de plume of Jeff Givens, a local real estate agent turned amateur meteorologist who has much more power over my life than anyone running a WordPress blog should. His website offers weather forecasts, blow-by-blows of storms, and roundups of precipitation totals—with a heavy dose of personal opinion. Sometimes the posts are excited updates: “Saturday 4:30 am: It’s not over yet! The closed low-pressure is spinning over Arizona early this morning.” Sometimes he’ll take a deep dive into the variability of La Nina, the cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to bring dry winters to the Southwest, or the difference between Canadian and European forecasting models. Sometimes he’ll answer requests from fans who ask for specific forecasts within their individual microclimate. In the forecast the day after my Sunday soaking, Givens walked back what he’d posted the day before, responding to the razzing he’d received from readers. You don’t get that from the Weather Channel.
Followers who subscribe to his email list might get three updates a day when storms are firing, sometimes time-stamped 3 A.M., 9 A.M., then noon. I read every one. And I’m not alone. Givens has 19,100 subscribers. The local population is about 19,500, and that includes children.
Givens is more accurate than any other weather source around here, and that makes him arguably the biggest celebrity in my smallish town. Our collective excitement crescendos with his forecasts, and whether they lead to joyful or disappointing experiences outside, we piece together a postmortem in the days that follow. Sometimes he sends the whole town into a spiral. Like any forecaster, occasionally he’s wrong. I’m on multiple ski-planning text chains that dissect his accuracy. “He never admits when he’s wrong,” one friend complained. “I just don’t like his syntax,” another told me, while her husband admitted to obsessively reading every post. “Too many emails!” several others said. “How can you get mad at him, he’s doing it for free,” someone countered.
He is a common denominator: a folk hero and a prophet and the person to blame when your plans go to shit. Everyone I know has an opinion about his forecasts. And I mean literally everyone.
Yesterday at the doctor, as I shivered in my gown, the nurse asked me how the weather had been on the way over. “Durango Weather Guy says it’s supposed to get bad this weekend,” she said, unprompted.
I needed to understand how this faceless man had become a ubiquitous and mercurial guru—and wormed his way into the brains and hearts of my community. So I emailed Givens and asked him to meet up.
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