At least half. I live in the middle of the woods and the tree canopy keeps the sunlight from making much headway towards melting the snow before it hits the 50s for several days in a row.
Okay, this 6.5 feet of snow is really starting to bother me. It’s getting to the point where my car is getting stuck, and it really makes me want a 4x4 right now, but I don’t need an expensive gas guzzler for more than a few weeks out of the year.
It melted a bit today and a big truck came flying past me and I was just at the height for his tires to spin a bunch of slush right over my windshield. Not being able to see is scary!
Not sure if this Facebook link will work (should do as it’s a public album) but this is just bonkers:
It’s like something out of The Day After Tomorrow.
That is … surreal. We don’t have anything like that, thankfully!
I feel like I’m inside John Malkovich’s head when he’s visiting the dentist.
The ice dams have built up to over a foot on our eaves, back and front of the house. Mrs Piper and I spent a couple of hours on Sunday, chipping away at them with various implements, on our porch roof, to no avail. Sunday was warm and melty, and we started seeing a lot of drips in the windows - very bad news.
Then Mrs Piper found a guy. A guy with power drills, power chisels, and harnesses. The guy and his mate are up on our roof, drilling away. Huge chunks of ice are occasionally landing on our front snow-drift. (We don’t have a front lawn anymore). Huge, like a foot or more long, and six inches or more deep.
Neighbours out for evening walks are stopping and staring longingly at the guy and his mate and their equipment. Everyone in the neighbourhood has ice dams. (Except for the snow removal fanatics who have been raking their roofs since the first day-long snowfall back in November. They instead are smugly moving piles of snow around in their yards.)
One guy in a car is literally parked in our front drive. We have no idea who he is, but we assume he’s waiting until the ice guy comes down, because he wants to hire the ice guy to take ice dams off his roof. Or, alternatively, if the ice guy says he’s busy, I assume drive-way-parking guy intends to kidnap ice guy and carry him away to remove ice dams on his roof.
We’ve got a huge ice dam in one spot, too, but the $1500 we spent on insulating the house underneath it several years ago seems to be working. At least, we’re not seeing any water coming in the house, unlike before. Cross your fingers, cuz I don’t think we have anyone like your drill guy in our town.
As our Good Friday penitence, Mrs Piper and I spent two hours on our porch roof (flat), chipping off the ice.
Saturday and today, we spent several hours moving the ice and snow chipped off by the ice guy away from the foundations.
This evening, Mrs Piper turned her attention to preventing seepage in the basement and went on-line for helpful tips.
Insane giggling broke out. I asked why.
She said, "The number 1 tip they give is, 'check roofs and eaves for excess snow load. ’ "
We think we’ve got that covered.
Heh! Good one!
We’ve been having this weird period of snow and thaw that’s resulted in the snow load on the steep parts of our roof migrating downwards like a glacier. It never gets quite warm enough for it to melt all the way, but it’s thick and heavy, and so just sloooowly slips downwards.
Three days ago, we noticed the edge of the snow pile slipping off the edge of the roof, so where the eaves overhang the garage door, there was about 3-4" of snow shelf protruding menacingly over the edge of the eave. Yesterday afternoon, before it started blizzarding again with lake-effect snow (nothing like a freakin’ snowstorm on EASTER), we noticed it had gotten to be about 6" or 8" long. More than enough to kill or maim a human, much less one of our pugs, if we were standing in the wrong place when it broke. So Mr. Athena grabbed a broom with a long handle, stood safely back inside the garage, and did his best to knock the ice off with the handle of the broom. Most of it came off, in huge cement-like chunks, some of which weighed enough that I couldn’t move them. Mr. Athena barely could.
I’m ready for it to stop snowing now. It’s April, this much snow is out-of-place even for here.
Looks like we’ll get an extra weekend of skiing. 
Bastard!
Happy skiing bastard, to be correct.
Well, we found someone who would empty out our backyard of snow. He came with a skid-steer with an 8’ bucket (larger than your typical Bobcat) and a grain truck. Four trips to the snow dump later, and our backyard now looks like it normally does in early March: some snow, but not a metric buttload that makes you say “What?”
We asked skid-steer guy how much he estimated he took out. He did some mental calculations, and then said, “Well, it was probably 70 yards of snow, but there was a lot of ice mixed in, so 4 or 5 tons.”
I thought they closed your snow dump?
An angry mob with torches and pitchforks, chanting “We got Snow! Where will it go?” marched on the snowdump, and they suddenly found another area of the dump that could be used.
A roof glacier! I’ve never heard of such a thing! I hope it doesn’t spread north-westward.
We’ve also heard that at least 400 roofs have collapsed from the weight of the snow in Regina this year.
Winter can end now.
Please?
It’s doing the glacier thing in the back now. Here’s a couple pics:
Hard to tell from the pic, but I’m thinking those ice overhangs are around 10" long.
Holy crap!
You probably don’t want to hear that it’s going to be about 18ºC here today, and the snow is almost completely gone. But don’t worry, I’m not gloating too much - you can gloat at us when we get a huge snowstorm in May, or everything is flattened by hail in August. 