December Snowfall

December 27, 2021

December turned out to be a very snowy month in Ocean Falls. 

The locals who have been here for a long time said that in the last 20 years they had only once before had snow like we had this past December.  The weather was bitterly cold with arctic outflow winds ripping down over the mountaintops. 

Ron’s house, where we were living, was very hard to keep warm in that kind of weather.  We hung blankets up over the windows, but the whole house seemed to be a sieve for the wind and the draft was impossible to keep out.  We kept the fire roaring 24/7, but still it seemed that even the living room, where the fireplace was, was never truly warm.  The front stairs up to the house froze into sheets of ice, and the road up to the alley was even more dangerous.  Other trucks had tried to make the hill only to slide their way back down the sheet of ice.  When our largest snowfall of several feet came, our alleyway stopped getting ploughed. 

 View of Baldy with snow curling down from the roof over the window.

When we had a total of about four feet of snow around Christmas time, the snow was slipping off of the metal roof at Ron’s and forming massive cornices. 

Jason was raking them off almost every day so that they were not a danger to the windows.  

Up at our own house the snow was not slipping down because there was not enough heat to make the snow slide.  Jason and I decided that we did not want to leave that much snow on our roof while we were away, in case the weather warmed up suddenly and made it too heavy for the roof.  So, we grabbed a couple of shovels and went to work.  It was a lot of snow to move, but we got it done and it made the snow banks very large around our house.

Note the garden shed in the left of the picture.

 

Since we did not have very much wood storage at Ron’s house, and since we were burning so much wood in the cold weather, we had to go and fetch more wood from our storage in the shed in the back alley behind Ken and Shelly’s house, which was where we had been living last year. We used Ron’s six-wheeler Polaris, as it was the safest vehicle in the snow, but because the alley had not been ploughed we had to clear our own path just wide enough for the six-wheeler to get through.

It was a hard day, with a lot of wood moving, but it was also fun to be working out in the snow and in the sunshine.  Even though the winds were very cold, it was still beautiful.