Hoehne Forensic Weather & Hail Impact Report

Look, I’ve been replacing roofs up here for over twenty years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about Hoehne, it’s that we’re sitting right in the bullseye for hail. You see the way the Spanish Peaks and the Raton Mesa funnel the spring and summer storms? That’s not just a pretty view—that’s a natural wind tunnel. When those big supercells roll down from the northeast, they get squeezed between the mountains and the high plains, which forces the updrafts to spin faster and punch higher. That’s when you get those grapefruit-sized stones, not just the little pea-shooters. And because our town sits on that open, flat prairie with no tree line to break the wind, those hailstones are coming in sideways at 60, 70 miles an hour. I’ve pulled shingles off houses up here that looked like someone took a shotgun to them, and the decking underneath was dented like a golf ball.

Then you’ve got the other half of the problem: the wind that comes with those same storms, especially in May and June. That’s our real hail season, but it’s also when the jet stream dips down and parks right over the Raton Pass. That creates these straight-line wind events—not tornadoes, but gusts that can hit 80 or 90 miles an hour for a solid ten minutes. The combination is brutal because the hail weakens the shingle’s granule layer, and then the wind gets under those lifted edges and just peels them back like a sardine can. Plus, our freeze-thaw cycle in the winter—where it’s 60 degrees one day and 10 below the next—makes the asphalt brittle, so by the time spring rolls around, your roof is already primed to crack under the first big impact. Honestly, if you’ve got a roof older than ten years up here, you’re not asking *if* it’s going to leak, you’re asking *where* the first stain will show up. That’s just the reality of living in this beautiful, windy, hail-prone corner of Colorado.