After-Snow Pix

Okay, I'm going to blather just a bit more about the blizzard, because in terms of duration and snow accumulation this one was almost exactly like the one we had two years ago in February. But where it took me four days to finish fully digging out from that one, I got everything finished yesterday, including clearing the end of the driveway of the heavy stuff left by the plows (with some help from the Mrs.), and then I went back out this morning for an hour to clear the couple of inches more that fell overnight and re-clear the end of the driveway (much less daunting the second time).

What was different? I'm not sure, but the snow was very light, so even though it took three or four scoops of the shovel to clear each spot in front of me as I moved along, it was pretty easy to throw. The wind also causes some drifting that tends to leave large areas of our driveway with just a couple of inches, or in some spots nothing at all. There was also some of this on the other side of the house that allowed me to clear a path on that side too. I think during the storm two years ago the wind was blowing from a different direction and the drifting worked against me.

Here's what our backyard looked like as of this afternoon, looking down from the back porch. That chain-link fence on the left is three feet high; the wood one on the right is five. At the bottom you can see a drift line created by wind, with snow thrown on top of it from my shoveling. And I see tracks where an animal made its way along the side of the garage.

Down at ground level and looking to the right of the above shot, you can see what I was dealing with. Just beyond the black thing (covered grill) was the first wind-created shallow area that saved me some time and trouble yesterday.

Rounding the corner of the back porch and looking down the driveway toward the street shows that the highest drifting happened away from our house. What you can't see is at the highest point of that drift I dug right into it so I could clear the dryer vent on our neighbor's basement window. I realized later that I didn't take any pictures out front, where the snow piles created by shoveling are much higher. Maybe tomorrow...