I remember one time it wasn’t digging out of as much as it was digging into. Back in the '80s, I was a kid coming home from a family Christmas trip from Detroit to Eau Claire, WI (a nine hour trip) and we found our driveway covered by three to four feet of snow. After a roadtrip, the prospect of spending the next couple of hours to dig IN to the residence really sucked. Hell, just getting to the scoop shovel we had was a bitch.
While I don’t know the EXACT measurements, a three to four foot dumping wasn’t uncommon for the area.
Old Dutch potato chips used to run this commercial that was focused on a television screen and talked about a massive snow storm on Halloween; I lived right in the middle of that system in MN. I got a ton of candy that year because most kids didn’t go out. HA! Anyway, my dad had to jump out of my bedroom window (2nd floor) to get outside because all of the doors were blocked by snow. I don’t remember how much snow we got, but I could step from the top of a drift onto the roof of our garage. We don’t get a lot of storms like that anymore.
A more recent storm (within the last 3 years or so) caused near panic because I thought my car had been stolen from my driveway. Turns out it was completely buried in a drift. Yet I still live here willingly. I can’t imagine why…
That’s pretty much what it’s like here through most of January, February, and March. Maybe not 15’ high all over, but the snowbanks on the sides of the roads get pretty damn big in places. When they get too high, the city comes around with a snowbank-cutting truck, and chops 'em down. But you definitely get the tunnel effect when driving through town.
In November and December 1995 we already had 1 1/2 feet of snow, and January 8 1996 we got 26 inches in 24 hours. There was no place to put it. To clear our main street, they just pushed it all into the middle–6 foot snow banks.
At least this time the ground was clear before the snow started.
A lot of false memories in this thread in relation to actual snowfall totals. Outside of those in lake snow areas and the mountains, snowfall totals from a single storm over 24" are extremely rare, particularly in the Midwest. 3 feet of snow is almost unheard of.
For the Northeast, the storm of 1996 is responsible for most of the records (by far) in that area. The highest snowfall total was 35" in Whitehouse Station, NJ, and for major cities Philly had close to 31". Note that these totals are all-time records for recorded history. By comparison, the “Perfect Storm” of 1993 crossed the 20" mark in only a few parts of PA, and less than 15" in most places.
Not to single out any particular post, because many of them are exaggerated, but Eau Claire, WI has never seen 3 feet of snow in an entire month, let alone a single snowfall.
Note: Drifts of 3-4 feet or even much higher are relatively common, especially in the midwest, but that is not what is being said.
My record - Storm of March, 2003, Boulder, CO - 38" of actual snow, no drifting.
Years back I went on Outward Bound’s Ski Mountaineering course. This took us up and over Mt. Massive in March. Each night we’d need to cook and would have to dig a fire pit down through the snow until we’d reach the ground. It needed to be big enough to hold about a dozen people comfortably as, protected from the wind and substantially warmer within, we’d usually linger there afterwards, dry our socks, etc. I really enjoyed digging these, usually with the help of two others, but a couple of days in a row it meant removing 14 or 15 feet of snow over an area the size of your average living room, this after crosscountry skiing all day and at substantial elevation. Sounds like work now but at 19 I gladly paid for the privilege.
Because I think my post is one of the ones to which you’re referring, I should probably restate: I may be misremembering by about a foot, but the total of the two storms to which I refer was at least three feet–must have been, because it rose to well over my dog’s head (she stood a little over two feet high to the top of her head), even where it wasn’t drifted.
I’m guessing it was '96, but I’m not positive. Hardly common for Maryland, but it did happen.
You have to remember that the reported snowfall is what falls at the spot where they actually measure. In my area, that’s often not where the majority of snow is, and quite often it can be off by a whole lot. I’ve seen it where I have a ton of snow at my house, but friends who live across town have none, and vice versa. So I, for one, believe that it’s entirely possible for areas to have more (or less) snow than what is offically reported.
And on a completely different topic, I think I remember that snowstorm in Boulder. My and my yooper friends ran around helping people get their cars out of snowbanks and such. The Coloradans didn’t know what to do! (or should I say… the Californians :-))
That March 2003 storm in Colorado was really something! We got a couple-few extra days of spring break. A house down the street from us lost its roof and the family could not move back in until summer. And yes, the drifts were very very high.
'97 was bad also. As I recall, only the Broncos were able to make it out of the airport that Sunday. We go in the neighbordhood of 2 feet, higher drifts out on the plains.
But the Blizzard of '82 was the most memorable one for me. 24 inches for Christmas, drifts much higher in other places. It cost a mayor an election and brought about new snow removal tactics.
Actually, I think you did single out at least one post. No offense or disrespect intended though, from me.
I think the phrasing of the post title is how much you snow you dug out of (which got me to thinking back to personal memories), not how much recorded snow there was on one snowfall.
Granted, we were gone for a week, but the post thread did ask how much snow you dug out of, and with drifting, etc. there had to be at least three feet of snow high in the driveway of where I lived. Exaggeration? Maybe. But I’m sure some folks in the area would corroborate that it was that high.
Perhaps I have evolved into “crusty old man” syndrome where I exaggerate how much snow was on the ground when I was kid, if I came off like that, I apologize.
I remember that one very well. I was spending the night at a friend’s and we didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. I remember Halloween was a Thursday and we didn’t have school the next day which was perfect, because I was supposed to have a book read by Friday and hadn’t gotten it read. It gave me the whole weekend to read!
The winter of '96-'97 was a doozy. That was my first year of college and I had to commute 30 miles to school every day. It seemed like we got a blizzard every weekend that winter.
Brewster, NY, February of '83. 3-4 feet of snow in two storms over the course of one weekend. Our Husky/Samoyed/German Shepherd mix couldn’t deal with all that snow, she had to have a trench dug for her!
37" of snow in Jan 2001. We got six inches over night, which of course didn’t get shoved in the dark, then had a bizzard the next two days. By the end of the week it snowed twice more and there’d been 57"… that winter sucked, I stopped keeping track of the total for the winter when it passed 9’ in late Feb.
I made this animated gif http://www.geocities.com/theevilwriter/snow.gif of pictures I took way back then, since the snow fall amounts sounded too incedible to believe. I believe they were from the 37" point, not later in the week. Later in the week I was too busy curled up into a ball and praying for Spring.
