Winter 1970-71 & Its Weather
Winter As It Is Meant To Be
Early January 1971, most likely, given the snow depth. And note the elm trees. They had a few more years to go before Dutch Elm Disease took them down.
The 1970-71 Winter Season & Weather
At Mount Hermon, hockey was—and is—an outdoor sport. An open-air sport, with the rink as cold—or warm—as the air moving up or down or across the Connecticut River Valley. And because of that Mount Hermon hockey was—and is—a truly winter sport, in which as player or coach or fan you had to be willing to feel the full force of the season.
For the last Mount Hermon hockey team, the season likely started after Thanksgiving 1970.
Back then fall sports tended to end just before Thanksgiving. Deerfield Weekend was the last weekend of fall sports, and in Fall 1970 the football game was played on Saturday, November 22nd, at Deerfield.
For Thanksgiving we went home on Wednesday and most students didn’t need to be back at school until Monday night, November 30th. Chances are the varsity hockey team came back on Sunday so that they could get on the ice on Monday.
The next day, classes started and the varsity team got on its regular schedule of starting practice at around 4:30 or 5:00, as soon as the JV left the ice. (Back then, freshman/sophomore teams practiced at around 2:00 and then, after showering, had to go to late afternoon classes. The JV probably started practice around 3:30. The following year, late afternoon classes went away for the junior forms and varsity needed to start practicing after dinner.)
So in December 1970 the varsity began practice around the time the sun went down…and the air turned cold.
The last Mount Hermon hockey season was contained within the months of December 1970, January and February 1971 and those three months were truly wintry.
According to weather service records from the Amherst station, December 1970 started mild, with the month’s warmest day, 62 degrees, on December 2nd. Then it got cold and stayed cold. Seventeen days that month the temperature never got above 32. The mean temperature for the month was 24.2 degrees, 4.1 degrees below normal. (Ratchet all these Amherst temperatures down and snow fall totals up to account for Mount Hermon being a bit farther north, higher and more exposed to northwest winds.)
Over two feet of snow feel in December and on December 31st the temperature got down to 5 below.
The guys probably had about 2 weeks off for Christmas and returned to Gill right after New Year’s, hopefully not having lost all their pre-Christmas fitness. Christmas Week Tournaments didn't happen back then.
January was even colder, with the mean temperature for the month a bitter 17 degrees, 8.1 degrees below normal. The month’s low was minus 29, on January 19th, a Tuesday, the night before a Wednesday afternoon or evening game. Hopefully, an indoor one against Williston or Suffield at that point in January.
A foot of snow fell that month, but otherwise the month was dry. Dry and really cold, with 11 days that month reaching sub-zero temperatures.
The tall brick smokestack of the central steam plant would’ve sent an endless plume into the winter sky.
At that those temperatures, the rink ice would’ve been prone to chipping when put under pressure from a fully loaded, arcing blade. And with the dry air, everybody’s fingers dried out like leather, developing deep cracked ruts in the finger joints from pulling hard on skate laces. Sticks had little flex, with all moisture frozen or dried out of them. A slap shot hitting your leather skate boot, which had no real padding anyway, felt like a gun shot. And as for the goalies, I can only imagine how stiff and cushion-less their pads felt in sub-zero cold, and how cold they must’ve gotten standing still so much of the time. Catching a puck in those thinly-padded goalie mitts of that era must’ve been pure torture on the meanest frozen days.
February started really cold, getting down to minus 23 on February 1st, but then got warmer, with a mean temperature of 27 for the month, or about normal.
By late February the days got longer, with varsity practices starting in daylight and on February 18th the guys felt the first pangs of spring, with the temperature getting up to 54.
And in the next few days the last Mount Hermon hockey season was over.