Fascinating Meteorology at the M & M Divide

Aunt Darlene, sis Gloria, and Mom, at the M & M Divide west of Guthrie Center, Iowa, 1995

After reading my post about the M & M Divide, a woman sent a note that she’d lived there as a child. The weather was spooky, she admitted. It could be raining, snowing, or monsoon-like conditions on one side, but once you crossed the divide, it could be sunny and calm. I couldn’t find anything about this phenomenon on the internet, so I asked on the Historic Guthrie County Facebook page if anyone else was familiar with it.

Yes! Tim said he’d lived on the divide most of his life and “it’s all true.”

DP reported that when he moved to the divide 23 years ago, his grandma told him he’d “better have good tires for your buggy.”

Debra, who had lived along the divide for 25 years, said that sometimes the weather was strange, “even to the point of raining on one side of the house but not the other.”

Tim has seen tornadoes on either side of the divide, but he’s never seen a a funnel touch down on the divide. “They usually die out before they get there.”

Nadine said that she’d lived 50 years on top of the divide and that the tales were true. The weather is different and often crazy. “Temps, fog, wind, where system skips, starts, ends. Great view though!”

Doris told about traveling from west of Guthrie Center to Des Moines for an appointment with a relative when it started snowing. It got so bad on the way home that they had to stop to clean off the windshield wipers. Her relative left for her home in Audubon, to the west, right away. When she got to the M&M divide and on west, “there was no snow at all.”

“I’ve lived on the divide for more than 50 years,” wrote another reader, and “it’s a different world on the divide!”

What a fascinating weather phenomenon.