Blizzard!

:date: 2025-12-30 19:51

Wow, what an intense winter we have had so far! This December we have had the exact kind of weather I would have expected for the coldest month of the winter, perhaps some time in late January or early February. If it all melts next week never to return, this winter has already been a "proper winter" and an impressive one at that.

We had several massive dumps of snow early in the month followed by some pretty intense cold - dropping to -4F/-20C with highs of 6F/-14 some days. I am spending a lot of energy shoveling snow.

Here is the season's accumulation so far up to the end of the year. (Updated after a couple of days as shown.)

The morning before yesterday (Dec 28) started off with a very strange thunderstorm where the sky lit up with lightning and thunder boomed. All day the weather just kept getting more intense with the temperatures dropping and the wind increasing. By evening we had snow coming down and just before we were about to go to bed, the power went out for a few minutes. We prepared for more power disruptions and went to bed. I slept really well because all of the shoveling but my wife lay awake worrying, reasonably, about a tree making our little dog even smaller. That was because the wind was absolutely howling - weather.gov said gusts of 50mph - and also because she heard a giant tree actually come crashing down near our house.

The power was cutting out every once in a while until finally at 0535, it dropped and did not come back on. I spent a long morning maxing out my snowblower's batteries and still leaving half of our driveway under 20" of snow. I went out on skis to check out how much of my forest got converted to firewood. There were two fallen trees blocking my ski path. Fortunately they didn't get hung up and will be several weeks of good firewood.

Spending the day without power was basically like a luxurious form of camping, something we're both quite good at. Burning wood in our new stove turned what could have been a nightmare into a cozy time to take a break from electronics and the internet. The big problem for us when the power is out is that we lose our well pump and therefore water. You'd be surprised how long it takes to obtain a liter of water by melting several bushels of snow. We bought a fancy back up battery for emergency purposes but we haven't figured out how to get it to power the well pump yet. Yesterday's situation is a reminder that one does not do casual experiments with the wiring of the well pump!

This morning we woke up to another foot or so of snow. Here's a photo of me clearing the deck.

And a telephone style video if you like that kind of thing.

I'm wearing my full motor skiing outfit because the wind was still quite heavy and erratic.

At 1130, after about 36 hours, the power finally came back on. So not really too bad of an outage given the conditions and the fact that we're in the middle of nowhere. By the end of the day I had all the snow cleared up. Here's a photo showing many interesting things. Note how some of the snow poles are just about to be buried. You can see some of the siding trim getting ripped off the house by an ice dam glacier. You can see that our pile of cleared snow is now taller than our greenhouse, around 2m. You can maybe just see the cuts I had to make into the snow bank at the start of the driveway; this is like a wheelchair ramp to climb up onto my ski trail from the driveway level which turns out to be quite a challenge.

It's snowing now but the forecast for the next few days is that the skies will clear and the temperatures will plummet again like that first blizzard at the end of November. This has been an impressively serious winter. It's been tiring but so has all the skiing it has enabled. I'll take this over a global warming winter any time.