It's a lovely night on the prairie...

nddons said:
Nice view, Mari! But I think you could use a snow blower. :thumbsup:
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Two women, out for a walk (snowshoe?), said the same thing. But I have always considered shoveling more healthy than breathing snowblower fumes. I have a 100 foot driveway; longer than most suburban driveways but not as long as Nate's. The biggest drift is always close to the house where I have some bushes. I shoveled a little more than half. The rest was pack-downable with the Forester.
 
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While I do sympathize, ya'll storms are about to ruin what has been a nice motorcycling/flying season here in Ohio within a couple hours or so. 70 degrees today pre-storm, 40's and 20's next week post-storm. How mean of you!


David
 

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docmirror said:
Ya know, if I was 30 years younger, I'd go to Copper or MJWP, maybe even Steamboat. But, that's the way it is, and no one catches me anyway. Well, maybe those little ski race rats in the club. Little rats anyway. :wink2:



I thought you knew about moving snow? Guess I was wrong. Last time I'll be made fun of for my old 8N on chains with a 6' blade. I'm still gonna put the loader on the front to pile it up out of the way. :yesnod:
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Hahha on Copper. You'd do fine. There's so many tourists that don't know how to ski and are downright dangerous missiles with no control at all on snowboards that if I bother to go anymore at all, I stay in the hard stuff away from the crowds.

As far as moving snow goes, learned a ton (literally) from this one. And I now have a man crush on the neighbor's John Deere with an automatic transmission and chains. That's the screwup with my tractor at the end of the day... No chains, no traction.

The snowblower attachment would have done great if it wasn't just sliding tires as soon as I hit anything. Moving it with a blade would have also worked "ok" except in the deepest parts where there was nowhere to push it.

The new property fence we thought was far enough from the road not to act as a snow fence and in all the storms since it was installed it has nicely deposited the snow between itself and the road. But we learned that with 60 MPH winds and more snow, the drift goes over one ditch, across the road, and easily fills the 3' deep ditch on the other side and more. It's an impressive berm if you could see how deep it is in the ditches.

The neighbor across the way has a snow fence about 30' inside of his fence from his driveway. His berm made a nice airfoil shape with the most snow right behind the fence and it's 4' high and 700 or 800 feet long but it kept it from piling up on his road. He had about 6" at the narrowest cross section of the "airfoil" profile view on his road and has a mountain of snow that climbs up to the snow fence. His enclosed work trailers created 6' drifts behind them on the downwind side of his road into his neighbor's property and buried their fence on that side. Amazing.

I also picked a crappy place to park the fifth wheel trailer and it also acted as a snow fence and deposited more snow right there in the low spot on the road.

So... Learned some stuff. That is so far the biggest storm with wind we have had in three years out here and our neighbor warned us it would happen eventually, but you really can't figure out what it's like until you go through one.

I really need a set of tractor chains and I dread looking for them in the large rear wheel size. His John Deere with the fat wide mowing tires and a set of chains just kept moving perfectly in the snow. But I don't think that size tire and wheel is possible on mine.

About the only option I had was to move the stuff with the bucket. That suuuuuucks. Seriously. Especially with a stick shift and mild crankiness of my hydraulics. (My bucket tip is slow. Raise/lower is fine.) Having the knobby old school narrow tires also suuuuuucks. Not only is it worse for traction it also tears up the road something fierce when it starts melting and turns to mud.

Aftermath photos around 10 AM when Bob helped clear in front of the stuck Dodge and helped me pull it out of the ditch. It had also started melting by then and was just starting to get slushy.

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Then after I did some more work on it and the problem the snowblower attachment has once it starts melting -- slush and it just clogs up. At that point I would have really liked a blade, like you said. Would have done perfect and finished off the clearing without tearing up the road.

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Here's the road at sunset tonight and check out the nifty hole around the fifth wheel. Haha. If I had about four fifth wheel trailers I could just park them down the length of the road before a storm. Haha.

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Elizabeth is the champ of the state. :D

The following Colorado snow totals have been reported by the National Weather Service for Nov. 17, 2015, as of 9 a.m.

Aurora - 8.5 inches

Bennett - 8.5 inches

Black Hawk - 7 inches

Breckenridge- 6 inches

Brookvale - 12 inches

Buckhorn Mountain - 4.9 inches

Buckley Air Force Base - 8 inches

Castle Rock - 7.5 inches

Centennial - 11 inches

Colorado Springs - 1.5 inches

Conifer - 15 inches

DIA - 4 inches

Elizabeth - 18 inches

Evergreen - 11 inches

Gary - 2 inches

Genesee - 16 inches

Golden - 12 inches

Julesburg - 1 inch

Kittredge - 14 inches

Lone Tree - 10.5 inches

Louisville - 2.5 inches

Monument - 14 inches

Nederland - 4 inches

Northglenn - 4.4 inches

Parker - 9 inches

Perry Park - 12 inches

Pinecliffe - 5 inches

Ponderosa Park - 15 inches

Silver Plume - 6 inches

Strasburg - 2 inches

Thornton - 3.8 inches

Vail - 8 inches

Westminster- 3 inches

Winter Park - 8 inches
 
Your tire chains shouldn't be that bad. Looking at the pictures pick-up or truck tire chains should work. Maybe not...hard to tell from picts.

Wait until you chain-up a real tractor, road grader, or have to hire a dozer to clear the drive...I've used a D-7 to push snow. It isn't pretty when the cat disappears behind a snow drift...
 
I'm surprised you have so much bare ground already. I don't think I have any.

In case people don't know, I'm guessing I live about 10 miles SW of Nate.
 
obviously Nate is in the banana belt
 
I was living in Conifer for the great fall blizzard of 97. I saw something that night I'll never see again. The road crews were out all night, up in the hills they use road graders with chains on all six wheels. The have a constant 'beep, beep, beep' so you know when they are around. About 2am I heard the beeping, and it stuck around for a few minutes. I looked out the window, and the snow was up to the sill. I could see the grader not moving, so I swore a bit, then put on my winter stuff, and some boots and trudged out there(more like swimming).

He was stuck in a ditch and all six wheels were buried. He called for a tow, and I went and got him a cup of hot stew. The second grader showed up and we strung two sets of chains between them, and after a while it was clear the second one wasn't going to pull the first one out quick. We had to move the chains three times to tug that thing sideways back and forth for a while. There was a lot of swearing.

We got him out and on their way, and a few minutes later as I was going to bed my neighbors roof collapsed. So, more trudging next door, and grabbing the kids and getting them in my place and bedded down. He was lucky, it was the section over the family room and just made a mess of half of the house. It was an unpleasant night/morning.
 
docmirror said:
I was living in Conifer for the great fall blizzard of 97. I saw something that night I'll never see again. The road crews were out all night, up in the hills they use road graders with chains on all six wheels. The have a constant 'beep, beep, beep' so you know when they are around. About 2am I heard the beeping, and it stuck around for a few minutes. I looked out the window, and the snow was up to the sill. I could see the grader not moving, so I swore a bit, then put on my winter stuff, and some boots and trudged out there(more like swimming).

He was stuck in a ditch and all six wheels were buried. He called for a tow, and I went and got him a cup of hot stew. The second grader showed up and we strung two sets of chains between them, and after a while it was clear the second one wasn't going to pull the first one out quick. We had to move the chains three times to tug that thing sideways back and forth for a while. There was a lot of swearing.

We got him out and on their way, and a few minutes later as I was going to bed my neighbors roof collapsed. So, more trudging next door, and grabbing the kids and getting them in my place and bedded down. He was lucky, it was the section over the family room and just made a mess of half of the house. It was an unpleasant night/morning.
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Ya shoulda been here for the blizzard of 04. It was a late spring upslope. 97 was nothing...
 
Clark1961 said:
Ya shoulda been here for the blizzard of 04. It was a late spring upslope. 97 was nothing...
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I think it was 03.

1. 45.7 inches December 1-5, 1913
2. 31.8 inches March 17-19, 2003
3. 30.4 inches November 2-4, 1946
4. 23.8 inches December 24, 1982
5. 23.0 inches April 23, 1885
6. 22.7 inches October 20-23, 1906
7. 21.9 inches October 24-25, 1997
8. 21.5 inches November 26-27, 1983
9. 20.7 inches December 20-21, 2006
10. 19.3 inches January 29-31, 1883
11. 19.0 inches April 24-25, 1935
12. 18.7 inches March 5-6, 1983
13. 18.5 inches March 20-22, 1944
14. 18.2 inches April 17-19, 1920
15. 18.0 inches March 19-20, 1907
16. 18.0 inches March 31-Apr 1, 1891
17. 17.7 inches November 19-21, 1979

I was there. It was a wet, heavy snow. Hit the city more than the hills as it came up slope and I was at 9000'. City got hammered and we were somewhat spared up there. That's the one that moved us out of CO. We sold the house that June, and headed somewhere warmer.
 
Clark1961 said:
Ya shoulda been here for the blizzard of 04. It was a late spring upslope. 97 was nothing...
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That one (04) was definitely worse than this current one. We got snowed out of KAPA for two days and when I got home there were at least 2'-3' drifts in my driveway. I parked on the side of the road and waded through the snow to my house. After that I used snowshoes to get to and from my car until it melted enough to drive in my driveway.
 
Clark1961 said:
Ya shoulda been here for the blizzard of 04. It was a late spring upslope. 97 was nothing...
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That was March '03. I remember that real well because the day after it stopped I was snowblowing the whole freaking neighborhood at the city house and had finished my two driveways and a block worth of sidewalk and was headed back to the detached garage in the back yard down the side driveway to fuel up again, when the 43' X 13' awning over the back porch was nailed from above by the snow that decided to all come off the back (south) roof all at once. It collapsed it by ripping the posts out of the yard and swinging it at high speed into the back of the house where it knocked the electrical meter clean out of the panel.

Never seen Xcel Energy show up to anything so fast as when you call and say there's a live box underneath a half a ton of snow and a steel awning. Haha. Four trucks in ten minutes and the nutbag dude who scaled his way up the snow drift, peeled the awning away, saw the meter lying on the ground and just reached through all that water and mangled metal and plugged the meter back in like it was no big deal. Stuck a new seal ring and tag on it and they left in about 40 minutes flat.

Of course had to wait a while for all the snow to melt and hire a crew to remove all that mangled steel and then find a company to put up another steel awning that big, which buckled and dropped pans out of the frame the first heavy snow the next year, because the new crap isn't using as thick a steel and didn't have enough slope even though I told them multiple times that it didn't. They ended up paying to replace it again on their dime with the strongest gauge steel pans they could get, and the next one eventually buckled the steel beam/gutter but didn't break, a few years later. Thing had a ten year warranty and was "engineered" for higher loads so we tried to have them come fix it again, to no avail. The installer had gone under. Go figure.

Can't think of many companies I want to die, but somehow I was happy they went in the crapper. The first time the thing broke they sent the sales guy over to look at it and he showed up an hour before I got home and was drinking a six pack on my back porch when I got there and thought he could just offer me a beer and make it all go away. I told him to get the hell off my porch and call me with a repair date and a plan for how they'd make sure the second one didn't fall down. I was actually kinda amazed they showed up to rebuild it the second time. And in a way, it did hold up. Barely.

When we sold the house I told the new owners it should be high on their list to that whole thing down and replace it with a proper structure. My realtor thought I was nuts, but it's a full disclosure State and frankly, I made sure the damage to the thing got onto the disclosure paperwork because I did not want the liability nor the weight on my conscience if someone was standing under it the next time it fell down. Damn thing was a disaster waiting to happen. And I told the young couple who bought the place so. Tear it down kids. Build a nice wooden pergola or something that can handle a crap-ton of snow. And don't let the kids or anyone else be under it in any big snowstorm. Ever.

It still bums me out that nobody could find a replacement that was made of a good gauge of steel as thick as the original. That thing was beefy and it took an entire house roof full of snow falling on it all at once to kill it, and even then, it was the posts that gave way and bent inward toward the house that was the structural failure. The steel only bent because it had nowhere else to go.

'03 was an impressive one for sure. Big dump. Really big.
 
murphey said:
Dec 83. Friends from Chicago got stuck at my condo for 3 days.
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Ah yes. The Christmas Blizzard. That one was even bigger than '03 and it wasn't warm enough to melt it for a long time compared to the March storm. We were snowed in for a couple of days in the city and my mom and stepdad bashed their way up to my dad's parents house to drop us off for a late Christmas there.

They were hosting a party the night that storm hit, and they ended up with 12 people stuck at the house, including dad. They basically had a two day party with the guys working by day to try to clear the street and get vehicles moving and hiking to the convenience store a couple miles away to get various toiletries and sundry stuff people wanted.

I showed up the evening of the day everyone got their cars out, which was basically a leapfrog of vehicles that would make it a little way up their hill and then while the guys all dug it out, they'd pull it back with a chain and another vehicle and the next person would try. All high clearance 4WDs. Just kept trading off who got stuck next until they made it to the flat at the top of the hill. Or so I heard later from dad.

The amazing part out of all those people stuck, only one couple had a dog and they'd asked if my grandparents minded if the dog came over. We're all dog folks so the answer was "sure!", and if they hadn't, the dog would have been stuck inside for two days or so at their house which lost power and they had pipes freeze and what not. Dog got lucky. Dog got pets from the 12 party goers and my grandparents and got leftovers of people food for two days. Haha. Dog probably thought it was the best Christmas ever!
 
The deepest for me has been 60" in 04 I think. Front range (Jamestown) to be exact. I took the 4runner up to the Peak to Peak and we stopped and dug down with the snowshovel. It was covering the barbed wire fences. They had it plowed. Just barely. The snow was too high to plow on the peak to peak highway and they had to use a snowblower and there were 8'. Totally covered cars. Totally. Snowed over then snowblowered over.
These front range Denver storms are consistently bigger than anything in the state althogh the recored is 80" down by Wolf Creek Pass.
 
denverpilot said:
When we sold the house I told the new owners it should be high on their list to that whole thing down and replace it with a proper structure. My realtor thought I was nuts, but it's a full disclosure State and frankly, I made sure the damage to the thing got onto the disclosure paperwork because I did not want the liability nor the weight on my conscience if someone was standing under it the next time it fell down. Damn thing was a disaster waiting to happen. And I told the young couple who bought the place so. Tear it down kids. Build a nice wooden pergola or something that can handle a crap-ton of snow. And don't let the kids or anyone else be under it in any big snowstorm. Ever.

'03 was an impressive one for sure. Big dump. Really big.
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Shades of sales past. I sold the place in Conifer that June and I had built a pretty nice enclosed tree house in the back between a few pines. The new buyers had four kids and I told them I had to knock the tree house down. That didn't sit well but I told them it was not a code structure, and I didn't want to get sued. Even though it lasted through the March blizzard just fine. The kids whined enough and we went to a RE atty and I asked for a hold harmless that would survive any and all law attacks. We got it done, and I left it up but removed the roof(thus making it LESS safe in a snow storm), and the new owners promptly put the roof back on after escrow closed. As far as I know, it's still up. Yup, I just looked on google Earth and I can see the roof in the pines!

Maybe it was the March 03 when the neighbor roof came down? Can't recall anymore.
 
I'll be the one closing taxiways for setting up plows and filing NOTAMs for it :p I stay warm in the Ops center from the sound of it
 
overdrive148 said:
I'll be the one closing taxiways for setting up plows and filing NOTAMs for it :p I stay warm in the Ops center from the sound of it
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uh huh, the most junior man is always the one that gets sacrificed. LOL

David
 
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