As of today I can confidently say this winter season has been just incredible. We had a solid early start (by East Coast standards) back in December although most of that accumulation melted. January was great bringing us cold temperatures and more snow accumulation, while February has been just incredible.

Although Sandra and I have been busy on weekends with pool tournaments, they have been finishing by Saturday evening. This year I've been able to balance outdoor adventures and life stuff much better than the past two seasons.  I've completed a few awesome outdoor adventures over the past few weeks aiming to take advantage of these fantastic winter conditions, with more planned. Ice coverage on most ponds has been between 8-12 inches, many have a lot of slush due to snow loading, enough to travel on very cautiously. Snow conditions in the woods is about the best its been in quite a few years.

This week's storm began around 9pm on Tuesday and was forecast to be a good one. Sandra and I got home around 1am and the Murano's normal parking spot was already drifted in so I lodged it in front of the truck.

Accumulation on that side of the driveway just got higher and higher overnight due to the strong winds brought by this storm system. It would be an incredible workout for the Honda 9/28 to get this all moved!

Like the last couple major snow events, we had a lull in the storm around noon on Wednesday so I headed out to get the driveway all cleared out and ready for round two! Up to this point we had well over 40cm of wind driven snow on the ground which left the city shut down for the day.

Thankfully, wind direction from this storm for once did not bury the basement door so it was easily dug out for a change!

This snow had a bunch of moisture in it, although it didn't rain, temps were warm enough to make it incredibly sticky. It was perfect snowman making snow!

An area of the driveway approximately fifty feet by twenty feet wide had to be cleared, knocked down with a shovel and cleared again. Rinse and repeat, this snow was too dense to ride the tracks up on it and take off the top layer. The track drive would spin out trying to shove the bucket through the unusually dense drift.

Running the blower up to the rear deck on my ATV loading ramps is still the smartest, time saving & back saving thing I started doing this year!

Round one of snow clearing took me over three hours and a full tank of gas in the blower. Around 4pm snowfall started to pickup once again leaving most businesses closed for the remainder of the day and evening.

Thursday morning arrived and with it approximately 15cm of additional snow, not as crazy as yesterday but enough to cause delayed openings for offices and businesses throughout the city. This brought snowfall totals in our area to just under 60cm while parts of Paradise recorded up to 75cm!

Snow clearing operations were much more relaxed this morning, the plow roll at the end of the driveway was significant but nothing too hard to deal with at all.

Any winter where snow covers the back fence is a sure sign of a great winter!

A little over an hour later and the driveway, walkways and decks were all cleared off once again.

Cheers, MIKE

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