Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Thaw, then freeze, and more bitter cold

Monday and Tuesday saw a bit of thawing, resulting once again in slushy, mushy, splashy, squishy, slippery roads, sidewalks, and generally everywhere. It continued to snow off and on. Monday, of course, because it was just above freezing, the snow was heavy and wet.

Yesterday, by noon the temperatures had once again fallen below freezing and strong winds had picked up. The Narrows were very choppy, and snow was falling horizontally. Many people think yesterday may have been the strongest combination of snow and wind to occur in fairly long memory here. One might almost call it a blizzard.

I went walking about to run some errands today and discovered that the unplowed areas have around 2 feet of snow. On the way to the post office I took the trails that cut through the muskeg and go up to the ballfield, and then through more muskeg out to the big grocery store. I tried to go up a short embankment but discovered that there was no way I could walk through it as the snow came all the way up above my knees. And then from the post office I thought I'd go on the foot/bike path, but that was unplowed. When I stepped into it, I discovered that the snow came all the way up to my thighs. I quickly retreated back to the road and walked down to the city along the side of the road. The plows have been busy, but the roads are getting quite narrow with large piles of snow all along the sides of the roads.

According to the forecast, the temperature once again will dip into the single digits tomorrow night before slowly warming up again into the 20's and then into the low 30's early next week.

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