Yesterday, we got a rather serious amount of snow, well more than a foot of fluffy powder. According to our local newspaper, that amount was the second largest snowfall total for any single day in November.
This morning as we unearthed ourselves from the white deluge, my face was alight with one of those smiles your story-telling uncle gets when he is about to lay on the words, "This one time in 68'"
(Maybe that's just me, but 1968 must have been a heck of a winter in the Pacific Northwest because I have heard that phrase a lot in my lifetime.)
Anyway, as the kids and I brushed all that powder off of their cars, shoveled the resulting three feet away from their vehicles, and dodged the crazy Hawaiian flying about on the John Deere tractor (Pineapple Snow Removal Service is INTENSE), I was reminded of one of my very favorite snow removal instances.
As many of you know, I spent a chunk of my life in a logging camp in the Alaskan wilderness. Icy Bay, as the camp was called, was set right smack dab in the Wrangell-St. Elias wilderness, a forty-five minute bush plane flight north of Yakutat, Alaska. It was a place of extremes, and that's putting it lightly.
For instance, one night we got, and I am not exaggerating, four feet of snow.
It was so much snow that the men stayed home from logging just to unbury the camp and shovel off the rooves as they were in danger of collapsing. I remember feeling a sense of gratitude for the rough cut beams that our single wide trailer had been reinforced with and an even bigger feeling of thanks for the dudes who were tromping about on our roof shoveling off that four feet of snow.
Now here's the thing, we had four feet of snow on the ground, and then the guys shoveled all fifty plus feet of length of our trailer roof off on top of it, the pile of snow next to our house was the size of a semi-truck!
So, I did the only natural thing when faced with such a surplus of snow, I tunneled into it. We all did.
After many hours of digging, I had a two doored cave right next to our wannigan (add on building porch). It was so cozy in my snowgloo, I went in and got my polyester patchwork quilt that my grandma had made me out of my very groovy aunt's sixties wardrobe and proudly announced,
"I'm sleeping in my snowgloo tonight!"
Mom must have been feeling the snowfall cheer, because she was cool with it, and that evening I did indeed sleep in my snowgloo in my snow clothes, all wrapped up like a polyester burrito of complete kid on an adventure contentedness.
I did have a flashlight, and one time when I clicked it on because I heard something I saw some very large shadows flickering through one of my snowgloo doors and onto the wall of my hand carved cavern.
Yep, that would be a bear.
You see, I always thought bears hibernated in the winter. Fun fact, they don't if there's food available.
And in Icy Bay, there were silver salmon still in the ditches and creeks in December.
Thankfully, the bear didn't decide to investigate the glow coming from my snowgloo door, which was a good thing, because in my excitement to sleep in my new fort, I never brought out any weapon at all.
The funny thing is, I still managed to get a fair bit of sleep, because it was super warm in my snow fort. That said, I must have been a little bit snow crazy to sleep in the there in the first place.
But what's life without a bit of adventure.
And in true wild Alaska weather style, the rains came and melted every bit of that snow over the next couple of days, so I am glad that I did have a snowgloo slumber party.
Just like I am glad the kids, hubs, and I tied a sled to the back of the old Toyota pickup and went wild on Thanksgiving afternoon. Because when it snows there's an opportunity for glee even if you have to watch out for an occasional fence post and not hibernating bear😉
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's almost as useful as the tractor, well in a different way anyway, iPhone.