Snowed In!

Now that we finally have a little bit of snow and some pretty cold weather, I am reminded of the blizzards and snow storms I have experienced during my lifetime. There are two that really stick out in my memory. The first one I remember was the winter of 1978 when we were hit with a blizzard on January 20^th that no one was expecting. Roads were closed for days, and it seemed like we didn’t go to school very much at all in January or February of that year.

The most memorable blizzard I’ve ever experienced, however, was on March 13, 1993. We had a ski trip planned for the Canaan Valley area and had two chalets rented in Timberline. There was a group of 20 or so of us who made the trip down to Timberline that weekend for some skiing, hot tub soaking, socializing, and fun. I wasn’t skiing because I had my three-week-old son with me, and fortunately I took plenty of baby formula.

The first evening there, we went to the restaurant to eat and asked our waitress how much snow they were expecting and she said two to three. We asked “inches” and she said “no, feet”—and she wasn’t lying. We woke up the next day to snow, and it kept snowing all day long and all through the night. Some of our group braved the slopes before they shut them down. It didn’t take long for the roads to become impassable. We were snowed in. We made the best of it playing cards, Scattergories, eating junk food, laughing, and having a good time.  At one point, the Sno-Cats came through to try to clear the road and took out our cable and the cable to the surrounding cabins, but we were very lucky to have a friend with us who was an electronics genius. He put on his Carhartt’s, went outside and tinkered around for a bit, and soon had everyone’s cable back on. I remember the people in the cabin next door applauding and giving him the “thumbs up” when their TV came back on. We were very lucky that we didn’t lose power, and we were also lucky enough to have a cozy fireplace. When we woke up the next morning there was about three to four feet of snow pressed up against the glass of the patio doors. We had to dig our way out of the cabin, and dig all of the cars out. We ended up being stuck there an extra day, and I’ve never seen snow drifts as tall as the ones we saw on the way home through Maryland and West Virginia. I was never afraid of the storm. In fact, it was fun being snowed in with people that we cared about and had fun with, and to this day is one of my best memories of winter.

Image courtesy of Unsplash.