It’s Been All Tumbleweeds, All the Time, in Utah and Beyond

On Saturday morning, residents of South Jordan, Utah, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City, woke up to an astonishing sight. Thousands of tumbleweeds had blown into town and piled up against people’s homes overnight.

Roads were blocked. Entire cars buried. In some cases, the tumbleweed jumbles reached the rooflines or upstairs balconies of people’s homes, said Rachael Van Cleave, the city’s public information officer.

“It was quite a sight to see,” she said. “They just rolled right into a lot of our neighborhoods, blocking homes, their front doors and their garages, 10 and maybe even up to 15 feet high.”

Winds of 70 to 80 miles per hour had blown across much of Utah for a few days, peaking on Saturday. Tumbleweeds also blew en masse into South Jordan’s neighbor city of Eagle Mountain, and across stretches of open land and highways in Nevada and western Utah.

Before South Jordan got its current name, the city was called Gale, “as in gale-force winds,” Ms. Van Cleave said.

This week’s wind was part of the same cold front and storm that dumped 10 feet of snow on parts of California. In Utah, the tumbleweeds were quickly followed by snow starting on Saturday evening.

Winter storms and accompanying winds are normal in Utah, but the strength of the recent winds was unusual, said Hayden Mahan, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Salt Lake City. Several thousand homes lost power and ski resorts in the area shut down, he said.

The wind also kicked up dust, reducing visibility at the Salt Lake City airport and grounding incoming flights.

In Utah as everywhere, climate change is sometimes contributing to unusually powerful or weird weather patterns, though this particular storm can’t necessarily be attributed to warming, said Jonathon Meyer, a climatologist at the Utah Climate Center.

One reason Jordan City in particular was so besieged this week is because the city sits at what experts call the “wildland-urban interface” — a name given to places where things like neighborhoods and houses bump up against undeveloped land where more vegetation grows. The term is normally used when discussing wildfires, but tumbleweed invasions can happen in similar environments.

Asked if communities on the Salt Lake City region’s urban border — the ones overrun with tumbleweeds right now — might also be at risk of wildfires, Dr. Meyer said “absolutely.”

Utah was the fastest growing state in the country as of the 2020 census, and South Jordan one of the fastest growing cities. The area received an additional influx of new residents seeking space and outdoor recreation during the coronavirus pandemic, and currently has a population of about 87,000. In 2010, the city only had a population of about 50,000.

South Jordan’s wildland-urban interface is creeping west, where the city has been annexing land previously owned by a copper mine and developing it into master-planned residential communities.

Although this latest tumbleweed storm was particularly eye-popping, the city is no stranger to the “tumblemageddon” phenomenon. Whichever new neighborhood is farthest west at the moment catches the tumbleweeds, according to Ms. Van Cleave.

Tumbleweeds are dried, uprooted bushes of Russian thistle, an invasive species that came to North America in the 1870s. The plants have shallow roots and are adapted to dry out seasonally, pop out of the ground and tumble in the wind to spread their seeds.

The events of the weekend united the community in bemusement, with residents bringing out their snow shovels to help each other. “We’ve had a little fun with it. We try to laugh at something that’s so bizarre,” Ms. Van Cleave said.

They’re still cleaning up the prickly mess. As of late Tuesday, city workers had already made 25 trips to the landfill with dumpsters full of tumbleweeds.