We were hit with just shy of 30 inches of snow on Friday and Saturday. It was undeniably pretty…for about the first 10 inches…and then things got hairy.
Luckily, we didn’t lose power (as we have so many times)–there’s a reason we keep a generator handy in the garage. But keeping up with the shoveling proved exhausting.
We have a huge snowblower – you’ll see why we do in the driveway picture below….our drive is more than 400 feet long and has an incline of about 30 degrees. It’s no easy feat to clear off after a big snow.
When a big snow comes along, we blow it off every few hours…but this storm came through in the wee hours of the morning. We focused on keeping the heat pumps clear. We still couldn’t keep the ice from forming on them.
To get to the snow early Saturday morning, we had to shovel a path for the blower to go up the drive. Then we could let it do its work…but the wet, slushy snow underneath couldn’t be thrown.
Here’s a shot of my husband’s hands nearly an hour after we’d come in. Four-plus hours of shoveling and snow-blower wrangling will do this to you. I shoveled just as much, but my hands weren’t so bad.
We managed to clear a path wide enough for a vehicle, but the pad below and the sides of the drive we let go. Finally, we called a snow plow to do the rest of the work.
Here are some shots of the snow around the area, nothing pretty…just a few photos to show you the depth.
| These are our electrical and cable boxes, nearly covered in snow. |
| The view up my driveway…after we finally hired someone with a snow plow to clear what we were too exhausted to manage. |
| The Great Wall of Snow created by the snow plow. I’m convinced that if the plow had done the job from the beginning, this wall would have been over six feet, not just chest high. |
It’s currently snowing…and the weather guys are predicting 10-to-18 more inches. Should be interesting!
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