kodiak

Snow Plows and Snow Drifts

My cabin is just of Highway 88, near Black Station for any of you who actually know the area. While it is not in metro-downtown anywhere, it is also not in the middle of nowhere, relative to anywhere else in the general Jackson-Pioneer area. That being said, you would expect some snow plowing of the roads, but not a whole lot. And I am not quite sure that plowing is good thing. I know it is a good thing, but it does make some things much, much more difficult.

From the front door you can barely see the lights of my car as I lock the doors

Take getting into my driveway for example. I can get to the cabin just fine, but getting in to my driveway seems to require a small miracle or perhaps a work of god. See even though the road is clear, my driveway has somewhere between 24 and 36 inches of snow on it- non-trivial, even in Subaru.

The first night, we had to sort of dig the car out of and into the driveway, tonight was even worse. The road had not really been plowed recently and we were in the middle of a crazy blizzard. Seriously, 10’s of inches of snow per hour it seemed. So while I could get to my driveway, I could not really stop as well as I would have liked, which meant that I sort of slid past it and down the hill another 10 feet or so. No biggie- just back up a little .. yeah that did not work so well either. Meg and I ended up, with a combination of pushing and shoveling, getting the car into the driveway. Which is good, except that I am not really sure we can actually get it out of the driveway in the morning. This should be fun …

After getting squared away and packed up for a day of skiing we headed out to the car, or where the car was last night when I parked it. Parking is a bit of an misnomer thought. I thinking referring to it as “getting my car stuck in a new location” would be more fitting. And thus begun the process of getting the car out yet again and getting headed to Kirkwood, or at least out of my little
woodland development.

Two hours later and after moving about 2 - 3 cubic meters of snow and fitting my chains, which required a bit of engineering as they did not exactly fit, we were moving up the hill and headed out to town to stock up on food, and materials needed for the rest of the
trip. Kirkwood did not happen.