S’no thank you, slush!

I’m not sure how it turned out this way, but we have slush and puddles at the end of our driveway, right next to ice on the township roadway that it seems their plow couldn’t remove. Meanwhile, the county and the state highways are mostly bare roads. I suspect the township has someone new on the maintenance crew this winter, because the plow has also put our mail box out of service twice in the past month. Our tax dollars at work!

I’m grumpy because the high moisture content slush was a royal pain to clear off the drive this morning. If the weather works out as I hope it will, the snow forecast for tomorrow night and Thursday will provide a traction coating over what otherwise will be a driveway trying to pass as a skating rink, or vice versa. Both the industrial tread on the tractor and the deep lugs on the snow blower dug into the slush but kept getting stuck. I’m not sure if chains would have helped and I sincerely hope conditions like today don’t occur frequently enough to make it worthwhile for me to research adding chains. If you have experience with tire chains on tractors and/or snowblowers, please leave a comment pro or con.

icy driveway, late December 2019

Photo by J. Harrington

We had a similar icy thaw in 2019, but the snow cover wasn’t nearly as deep. As those who study such things inform us via MPR, our winters aren’t what they used to be:

More slushy snow? 

And here's one more takeaway. As winters continue to warm, storms similar to what struck Minnesota last week, where temperatures hovered right around the freezing mark, producing heavy, slushy snow, or sleet, will likely become more common. 

“We’re not going to suddenly get storms like that every year,” said Blumenfeld.

But “it's safe to say, for the foreseeable future, we can expect them to have increased frequency.” Some years will be drier than others, but “when you average it all out, everything points to more of these.”

Blumenfeld said he hears frequently from skiers and other outdoor enthusiasts that even if the quantity of snow has remained strong, the quality of the snow has degraded. There’s less dry, fluffy powder than there used to be.

Tracy Twine, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Minnesota, said it can be useful to look to other parts of the country for analogs of what Minnesota’s winters could look like in the future.

“And so you can kind of think of the winters that happen in the southern Midwest, maybe Missouri, southern Illinois, that's the kind of weather that we might be seeing more typically in the future,” Twine said.

As much of a pain as our slush can be, I’m glad to not have to cope with winter as described by Jerry Apps in his book The Quiet Season: Remembering Country Winters. 

The Dead of Winter

By Samuel Menashe

In my coat I sit

At the window sill

Wintering with snow

That did not melt

It fell long ago

At night, by stealth

I was where I am

When the snow began

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.