Whew! Eight hours outdoors in the fresh Saskatchewan winter!
Between the three day blizzard in late November, the steady snow inDecember and January, and now an Alberta clipper dumping on us, the Piper household was under about two feet of snow. I was starting to worry about the weight load on our flat porch roof, plus the run-off from all the snow in the spring seeping into our basement.
So, fired up the snow blower, got out the ladder and shovels, borrowed my neighbour’s roof rake, and went to work.
We now again have access to the back lane, no snow between our house and the neighbours’ house, and minimal snow on the garage roof. An hour on the porch roof via the bedroom window, and the load is off the porch. Huge piles of snow in front of the house and on the diveway (that snow on the roof had to go somewhere), but that can wait for another day. (It was getting dark and cold: -25 C.)
hot chocolate with a shot of Screech, and now a Sleemans Honey Cream ale, and then off for a sok in the tub to warm up and ease my aching back!
You must be getting what we got over the last couple of days. I shovelled yesterday, and then had to do it all over again today.
Oh well. It’s winter in the Canadian west. Lots of shovelling and constant cold aren’t much fun, but you do get some bright, clear days; and awesomely beautiful scenery.
We just shovelled for half an hour yesterday, and I’ll need to shovel for a half hour or so tomorrow, too - in the fairly bitter cold. And the roads are truly beastly - loose snow on top of sheer ice that’s getting nicely polished up by the cold. What are we, halfway through winter? Jeeze, spring can’t come soon enough.
Yes, what’s with that? Why are Albertans so reluctant to (a) plow all the roads; and (b) use salt that would melt the ice? I don’t get it. Toronto winters weren’t much fun, but at least we had bare roads to drive on.
I’ve heard Albertans claim that they don’t want to pay more taxes to plow/clear all roads (yes, even residential ones) to bare pavement, but I wonder how much more they pay in car insurance because of the accidents that are caused by ice-covered roads?
Snow blowers are expensiveish power equipment sold in generally the same places as lawnmowers. They start at around several hundred dollars For the walk-behind type and go up into the thousands. Many people don’t have one, but the more prosperous people with long driveways to their houses do. Lawn-care companies that do snow-plowing in the winter will of course have them, and larger ones fitted to heavy machinery are a feature of municipal snow-removal crews.
No. You buy a snowblower. Most of them are gasoline-powered (see one here), and you store it in the summer and keep it ready in the winter. You don’t have to buy one–I don’t have one–but around here, many people do, especially if they have a lot of space to clear.
I couldn’t find a great photo of a snow shovel in action, but this may illustrate. It’s a wide-bladed shovel, designed to pick up material that is lighter than dirt, but that can scrape down to the concrete (or whatever) surface of driveways and sidewalks.
Just thinking about it (and apologies to Cunctator who as an Australian, no doubt thinks in metric, but I hope he will excuse me as my house and neighbourhood were planned and built in Imperial measurements):
City sidewalk: 50 feet by 4 feet = 200 square feet
Driveway: 12 feet by 60 feet = 720 square feet
Front and side paths: 30 feet by 4 feet = 120 square feet
So when I shovel, I’m moving 1040 square feet of snow in terms of surface. In terms of cubic measurements, if we have twelve inches of snow, as we have in the past two days, things are easy: I’ve shovelled 1040 cubic feet of snow.
It really depends on where you live. Urban Toronto folks are more likely to invest in shovels, while further up north your going to invest in a self propelled snowblower. From where I live, the big thing now is to attach a snow blower unit or a snowblade onto an ATV.
I guess that clipper is going to hit us sometime by the end of the week, if the other storms are anything to go by.
I live in an area with a lot of apartment blocks - this winter I witnessed a landlord plowing the sidewalk with a blade attached to the front of a John Deere lawnmower! Oh Canada, I love it here.
I just shake my head. In one of the big snowfalls this winter we realized that if we didn’t get our vehicles out of the work lot onto the street while it was snowing we weren’t getting them out at all. I was the only one with a shovel in the trunk! I also have a leafblower. You have to buy a powerful model though, mine doesn’t work as well for getting snow off the car like my Dad’s.
My brother-in-law was on City Council in Brandon. In his discussions with the Public Works committee, it came out that salt was ‘not considered effective’ in winters where the average temperature could stay at -15 or lower for weeks. There was a measure of salt added to the sand trucks, but it was no more than 100 lbs. per truck load, and it was mostly there to help the sand stick. The budget for plowing side streets was just prohibitively expensive - sand it once a week whether it needs it or not was the going solution.
Certainly side streets were a real challenge - in summer there would be parking on one side and two lanes going each direction. In winter, there was one de facto lane and cars had to dodge into driveways and empty parking spots to let each other pass.
Ah, the West! Out here in the Maritimes we’ve had a…slightly different winter that featured unending rain and some exciting winter flooding throughout December, and only in January did we dip into the -30 depths. But now we’ve got a good meter-ish of snow on the ground that seems here to stay until February, had a beautiful weekend to get all the roads scraped, and everybody managed to go out skating/snowshoeing/cross-country skiing.
Now that we’ve had our nice winter, they’re calling for three nor’easters in the next couple of weeks. Well, we enjoyed the weather while we had it. Time to stock up on salted gravel.
I love city living. Other than digging out the car a couple times a year the only shovelling we need to do is the walk up staircase but since the landlord’s ( gorgeous) son moved in downstairs last fall, he usually does it now! And our street gets cleared first since it’s a major road. Love it!
We do keep a shovel in each car though, and traction aids. Only ever used the latter once when I was unloading a friends stuff on a narrow 1-way street and a fire truck came through. I had to plow into a massive snow bank to let it pass. That was fun!
Seems the rest of the continent is expecting way more snow than us. Probably get 20cm or so but that’s a pretty normal storm for around here. I’m looking forward to it - most of the snow here has sublimated away and what’s left is awfully dirty and depressing.
