Saturday, February 16, 2008

A land I can claim, a land I can tame!

It's not enough to have to shovel snow out of your driveway. That's for winter amateurs.

If you want a real Canadian winter experience, you gotta kick it up a notch: you have to shovel out the snow pile you made from having to shovel your driveway.

Think about it; shoveling snow is about creating access to something. Most people need access to their driveway. In my case, I need access to the snow pile!

I made a post the other day about how the snow pile has exceeded my own height. I don't think my diagram did justice to the circumstance I find myself in. Maybe a photograph would better convey the situation:


You can see the driveway at my feet. This is perfectly level ground, and I'm 6' tall, so you can plainly see the pile is approaching 7'. It's hard to believe... at some point SEVEN feet of snow is going to have to melt before the lawn gets the first rays of sun in a season.

This was getting ridiculous... I can't shovel that high anymore. I had to try to do something. I had to shovel this snow pile onto a new snow pile!

So I climbed up on the mountain, sunk in to my knees, and got down to taming the land. I saw some of my neighbors (with their own mountain problem) looking at me. I have to think it would have been obvious to them what I was up to. The key is not to remove the snow, just spread it around, like a child attempting to make it look as if they ate most of their dinner.


There we go. Much better. And just in time too, freezing rain is threatening to "lock in" all our snow mountains over the weekend.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our pile is 7' too, but we're way too lazy to shovel ours. Maybe that rain tomorrow will make it smaller before it adds crunch. But besides, we like to live on the edge over here in Gatineau, the time-honoured sport of extreme snowpiles.

Julie said...

these photo almost make me miss Thunder Bay winters a little bit....ALMOST.....

I think I actually just miss putting on the snowpants and making snow forts all day with the kids next door. lol

Rob, Tina and the boys said...

We don't have nearly that much snow here, and luckily we don't have to snovel as we share a driveway with the gas bar. I was the one that was "voluntold" as a kid to knock down the snowbanks. We lived in a trailer park and the narrow roads made it a necessity to knock down the banks so you could see if anyone was coming down the hill before pulling out.