Spring is here – somewhere under the snow perhaps

Posted On April 15, 2021

It felt for a while like Father Winter was never going to leave, but Spring has now arrived. Though nights are still just below freezing, the sun is very warm. We have a record load of snow on the ground – for a while 1972 had deeper snow according to Whitehorse weather records, but we’ve now gone over the 1972 depths. If this is a fast melt, there will certainly be flooding, so the chilly nights are good. Here’s the weather forecast this morning.

This post is to show the slow progress being made by Spring over the past 3 weeks. The first photo shows the driveway on March 22nd. My car was outside because I had 2 contractors working in the garage, but there was room to get Cathy’s Jeep in. Temperatures were dropping into the -20sC at night.

By March 25th, though it was still very cold at night, the sun had some nice warmth by afternoon and I could do the bit of snow shovelling I was able to in a tshirt. Keeping a path open to the hot tub is always Job #1 🙂

On March 27th, we got another heavy dump of snow. This storm broke the all-time record for the deepest snow on the ground in Whitehorse on this day, 76 cm. “Snow” was the most-talked about subject by Yukoners on Facebook for a while after this.

One of my March 28th Facebook posts: “Getting this ‘social responsibility’ thing down pat – 2 vaccinations done, and voted in the Special Ballot today as I’ll be working as a clerk for the election on those days.”

With Spring coming eventually, snow melt and water going into inappropriate places becomes an issue, so getting snow away from places where that can be a problem needs to be done. It’s hard to imagine how I keep hurting myself.

On March 30th, I had an appointment to take the motorhome into the shop to see why the generator won’t run for more than a couple of minutes. But I couldn’t get out of the driveway. Even with tire chains on, the back wheels couldn’t climb up onto the packed ridges, and would just get buried in deep powder. I tried for 90 minutes then called a tow truck.

Hooking up to the tow truck’s winch for 50-60 feet was all it took. Off to the shop, where they soon diagnosed the problem as a faulty fuel pump and it’s now fixed.

Just for a bit of a change, we got a shower of snow pellets on March 31st. I hadn’t seen snow pellets for 2-3 years.

I was trying to deal with the stress of house renovations and deep snow by focussing on the beautiful things – posting photos on Facebook of some of the beautiful places I’ve been, and looking for the beauty right in front of me, like these little icicles hanging from a bank of 34-inch deep show hanging off my roof.

The Steller’s jays who have been in my feeder disappeared for a while and I was getting worried that this extra-long winter had killed them, but on April 3rd those flashes of gorgeous blue were back.

On April 7th warmer weather was in the 2-week weather forecasts so it was time to bring in a Bobcat with an operator willing to work harder to rip off several inches of packed snow. My comment with this photo on Facebook was “Maybe Spring is here if you dig deep enough – I’ve got a guy checking on that 🙂 “

Corey Pope did a great job of getting down to the gravel and will certainly be the first guy I call from here on. The last two operators told me that a Bobcat couldn’t do this work, that a heavier machine like a loader was needed. A machine is only as good as its operator. Anyway, this was the best $180 I’d spent in a while.

With the the driveway clear and starting to dry out, it was of course time for another good dump of snow, and it arrived the next day (April 8th). This was the result…

On April 10th, the temperature hit -25°C, matching the all-time low for that night set in 1986. On the 11th, it hit -31°C. Another all-time record broken.

On April 11th, I was back to dealing with the water that would soon be flowing.

On April 13th, My timing to catch this cool slow-motion roof-snow-slip was perfect on Tuesday – 10 minutes later it was all on the ground.

Rolf Campbell, the Whitehorse weather historian on Twitter (@YXY_Weather), has been very busy the past few weeks, posting record after record being broken. This was one of his tweets yesterday.

The next two photos were shot yesterday as a reminder of what this record snow looked like.

The sunny spot where I set my sun-lounger is often grassy but this year the elevation is 33 inches higher. Closer to the sun, which is good 🙂

Since having both the roof shingles and gutters replaced a few years ago, very thick ice build-ups have become an issue every spring, but nobody can figure out why.

Somewhere under that snow is 6 cords of firewood. In a normal winter I can peck away at it and it would be pretty much all split and stacked by now. This year I got perhaps half a cord done before the snow got too deep to deal with.

This is always a crazy-busy time of year, and there are a hundred jobs to do – I peck away at them as I’m able. Cathy and I are still putting the house back together after the renovations – I’ll show you what we had done once it’s all together in a few days.

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The blog rebuild is coming along well. This is blog post #1,255 and 389 are now back online in the new format. The post archives where you can see what’s been done and what’s coming is at http://www.explorenorth.com/blog-posts.html. Some virus packages are warning people that the site isn’t secure – although I bought the certificate to secure it a year ago (making the URLs begin with https), I haven’t been able to figure out how to install it, and my host (Westhost) has been no help, so I’m sort of stuck, but it’s on my radar to deal with.