Snowmageddon 2010, report from the frontier

If you’re not interested in Snow Stories, you may skip what follows.

Here’s a picture of the view from my house on Saturday:

It snowed. A lot.

I bought my snow blower last year so that I wouldn’t have to spend half a day shoveling snow.

I spent half of Sunday blowing snow.

If I’d have had to shovel it, I’d probably still be at it out there.

Seventeen inches, I’m told. The fifth highest snow accumulation in a single event since records have been kept in Minnesota.

The logistics of my snow blowing system are complex, and high snow levels only complicate them.

Because much of my driveway is sandwiched between my house and my neighbor’s (with little or no yard as a buffer), there are stretches where I have to throw the snow either in front of me, where I haven’t cleared it yet, or behind me.

After a normal snowfall, I usually throw that snow into the “to do” area, so I don’t have to go over the same ground twice.

But after a heavy fall, where the snow is, say, five inches higher than the intake on my snow blower (as was the case Sunday morning), the only sane choice is to throw that snow into the “already done” area. Because the snow ahead of me was already higher than my machine was designed for.

So once I’d done it all once, I had to go over it again, to clean up the backblow.

But once it was done, I surveyed my work in the sunlight and found it good.

And then went inside and lay down.

7 thoughts on “Snowmageddon 2010, report from the frontier”

  1. Ha! I didn’t get your whiteout picture joke until I looked at your post in Edit mode. I thought your photo wasn’t coming through, but no, it came through nice and white.

    It’s very cold here too, but we’ve had only flurry and dusting to deal with. We may get ice later this week.

  2. Blecchhh!

    Now that we’re in our 22nd year in North Dakota, my wife kindly bought me a snowblower. But it sounds like it would have more than met its match with the storm you describe….

  3. Glad to hear you were able to institute a proper space management protocol.

    Here at the Back Of The North Woods we only got about an inch. But we got a foot that missed you the week before Thanksgiving, so we can’t complain too much.

  4. On the other hand, it’s SUNNY AND IN THE LOW 70s in southern Arizona! When you get tired of shoveling, y’all come on down! Only thing you have to worry about are the UV rays–well, that and the snakes. And the scorpions. And the illegals.

  5. Well, I’ll say it again… OREGON….!

    We had a heavy rain storm here during the last several nights….(perhaps 2 or so inches…). Luckily, it didn’t pile up into unmanageable drifts! So when I got my rain-blower out, I discovered the rain had all run off into the street where the magical gutter system carried all away. So, just wheeled that ole blower away for another day…

    That plus the daily temps are still in the 50s and sometimes 60s… well…. here, like I said, there are no drifts of snow from those rascally snow-blowers and there are no dust storms that eat the paint off your car, like in Arizona.

    As we say out here…………. GOD’S COUNTRY!

    …where you never grow old….you just slowly rust away…

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