SNOW COMPLAINTS
Backwoods Blog;
in the woods and on the road…
Raymond Cumming on Kendall Street, Houlton (February 1920)
I hate to be the guy who complains about the weather…but, as one of those odd people who love snow and cold temperatures, I gotta say this has been a lousy winter by local standards. This is usually the time of year we are bragging about how much snow we have (compared to Boston) and the rigorous fortitude required living this far north. That being said, there’s not much to speak about as February comes to a close. According to my backwoods snow measurements (please see #67 for full details), we are currently at 36 inches for winter ’23-’24. That’s a yard stick high amount of total snow settling to where it is now, just enough to cover the fields and ground white (but barely). For comparison sake, we had 126 inches on this date in the winter of ’18-’19 and 69 inches in ’21-’22. All in all, this happens to be a lousy snow year, though, as I have already said, I hate to complain. I ran into my snow plow man the other day and he was complaining too, “It’s hard to make money when there’s no damn snow on the ground.” In today’s post you’ll find a record of snowfall amounts recorded at the cabin starting when I moved in during the winter of ’94 and there is also a record of snowfall amounts that appears in the Lowry family history book, of which my father had a copy. The location is undetermined, but my best guess is that the data was recorded in Houlton or Monticello. Enjoy winter everyone!
In the woods,
Dave
Getting Backwoods Blog into the mail…. (Getty)
Curb side snow removal…who needs boots? (Getty)
Backwoods snowfall records from Monticello, Maine
Snowfall records from Lowry Family History
Dave,
I’m with you. I remember the “good old days” of real winter when, driving to Caribou and Fort Kent, the road crews had to use V plows to push the piles up to telephone wire heights, especially between Mars Hill and Fort Fairfield on 1A. I didn’t even have to rake the camp roof in January, this year. A little shoveling took care of the necessary paths. No money for plow guys, but worse, less or no money for businesses relying on seasonal snow sledder income. Climate change must be starting to look like a problem even for deniers. Mike
I remember many winters when working for my father at Thompson Oil, dragging the fuel delivery hose from the oil truck up over the snowbanks, down the other side and then post-holing, one leg at a time through the snow to get to the house. Then, digging down through the snow to find the fill pipe. It wasn’t really customary and certainly not required to shovel a path for the deliveryman, but when someone did, it made your day!
Your comment, Chris, about digging down to the fill pipe reminds me of the first couple of years that we tapped maple trees out at camp. I had a Portland Stove Foundry Atlantic box stove we used to boil the sap on outdoors on the leach bed. When we got back from somewhere in southern Maine in March one year, we couldn’t find the stove. I had to dig down about 4 feet to find it and then find the firewood and then dig out a space big enough to work in. Smoke and ash from the pipe gave our syrup a unique flavor. And until a few years ago, I needed to use snowshoes to get to the trees.