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this is what 800 inches of snow

I have never seen snow like that and that is okay by me. Snow is not one of my favorite things.

More deep snow pictures....

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I cannot relate to such depths of snow. The most snow I have ever personally experienced was 19 inches which was dropped by a nor'easter when we lived in Virginia and the winds created drifts up to 6 feet deep. Of course other areas had no snow as the same winds that created the drifts blew all the snow away. I may have seen snow deeper than that as a kid in the area where I grew up but I don't specifically remember any snow that deep. In 1964 we were out of school for 6 consecutive weeks because of snow and ice storms. Ended up going to school for make up days until the end of June and also some Saturdays. Of course there are people who like lots of snow and frown on all this talk of global warming. Here is an image of such a protest.

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A friend told me that there are long fiberglass poles atop the telephone poles in the Dakotas because the snow gets so deep that it can completely obscure the telephone poles and these fiberglass poles provide guidance for the snow removal crews on the highway.
 
My hope for all the snow that is accumulated(ing), is that it finds it's way into surface reservoirs without causing excessive spring flooding. It would also be nice if the melt and runoff were slow enough to assist in replenishing aquifers rather than run right over them on the way to the Pacific.
 
John Bartley said:
My hope for all the snow that is accumulated(ing), is that it finds it's way into surface reservoirs without causing excessive spring flooding
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We used to have thousands of micro-reservoirs in the mountains that would slowly release water all summer long, then we killed all of the beaver.

Then we had massive flooding in the late 1800's/early 1900's...

So in the 20's and 30's we replaced the natural beaver reservoirs with hundreds of small dams and some larger dams. Side bonus lots of small hydro, undesired side effect destroyed the west coast salmon industry (largely due to dam design issues, it's technically possible to build fish friendly dams.. but when you pull stunts like destroying an entire years salmon run to fill a dam early for a senatorial visit show off... ).

The dams (especially the small dams) eventually silted in and became useless (even dangerous) for flood control and mostly useless for hydro and started getting super expensive to maintain (the real reasons), and some people liked having fish (the thing everyone blames because that's where we are here) so we started pulling out all of the small dams upstream from the big dams.

We're now mostly reliant on fewer larger reservoirs for flood control. And we saw how well that worked at the Oroville dam a few years back. I would expect more of that.

How we get out of this I'm not sure. The cheapest way is probably to restore some of the natural habitat but that's hard and probably impossible in some areas. It also won't work at all in others, at least not reliably and to the scale we want/need. Building new small dams is not just politically unpopular it's also very costly.

I would personally expect some very large flooding events over the next ten years or so until there are big enough problems people decide it's worth acting on, and then possibly some action to try to remediate them over the following twenty to thirty. This isn't an easy or quick problem to solve.
 
Mike Stafford said:
I have never seen snow like that and that is okay by me. Snow is not one of my favorite things.

More deep snow pictures....

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I cannot relate to such depths of snow. The most snow I have ever personally experienced was 19 inches which was dropped by a nor'easter when we lived in Virginia and the winds created drifts up to 6 feet deep. Of course other areas had no snow as the same winds that created the drifts blew all the snow away. I may have seen snow deeper than that as a kid in the area where I grew up but I don't specifically remember any snow that deep. In 1964 we were out of school for 6 consecutive weeks because of snow and ice storms. Ended up going to school for make up days until the end of June and also some Saturdays. Of course there are people who like lots of snow and frown on all this talk of global warming. Here is an image of such a protest.

View attachment 124507

A friend told me that there are long fiberglass poles atop the telephone poles in the Dakotas because the snow gets so deep that it can completely obscure the telephone poles and these fiberglass poles provide guidance for the snow removal crews on the highway.
Click to expand...
If we ever had that much snow, I would just become a bear and hibernate until spring melt was completed. :eek:
:D
 
I
Dave Hoskins said:
I like snow. That is as long as I see it in pictures and movies. Otherwise, I'll pass. Makes my bones hurt just thinking about it. I will say that 800" of snow is way beyond the scope of a Texan's imagination.
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think we had 4" of snow in Houston in 1989... stopped the city for a couple of days. I drove about7 miles to the office, sales manager drove from Magnolia to the office - about 40 miles, the general manager that lived 4 blocks away couldn't get out of his driveway.

'Course my radiator froze up on the way home... couldn't get my Chevy to the Levie and had to call my son to come get me in a Ford Escort.... :cool:
 
Yeah, most Texans and snow don't get along too well, lol. Except the skiers. Texas skiers are the source of many jokes in NM, Colorado, and surely California. (Californians make fun of everybody, just like everybody makes fun of Californians.) I remember there used to be a pretty common bumper sticker around here that said "If God had intended Texans to ski, he'd have given them mountains". :)
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
Yeah, most Texans and snow don't get along too well, lol. Except the skiers. Texas skiers are the source of many jokes in NM, Colorado, and surely California. (Californians make fun of everybody, just like everybody makes fun of Californians.) I remember there used to be a pretty common bumper sticker around here that said "If God had intended Texans to ski, he'd have given them mountains". :)
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I tried to ski once... I kept sliding down the hill...
 
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