Between the last snow and the first green comes the plains' least-loved season, when the frost thaws from below and turns every unpaved road and farmyard to bottomless mud.

When the humid warmth of summer collides with the plains' restless air, the sky can build the towering supercells that spawn the tornado, and the country watches the horizon.

Now and again in the western counties, a warm, dry chinook wind pours down and eats the snow in hours, a startling midwinter reprieve the old-timers call a snow-eater.

Alone among the region's rivers, the Red flows north toward a still-frozen outlet, and each spring its thaw sets the flat valley bracing for the flood.

Before the satellites, the plains read the coming seasons in the signs of nature and the pages of the almanac, and some of that old weather-lore lingers still.

When the great swirl of Arctic air that guards the pole weakens and spills south, the plains endure the deepest cold on the continent, days on end far below zero.