The Blizzard of ‘06

We got about two feet of snow dumped on us in a 24-hour period. If you're like me and aren't very good at imagining the depth, imagine wading though snow that comes up to between your knees and your mid-thighs. We have at least 2 feet of snow on the ground (everywhere), with drifts 3 to 4 feet high in places on our property.

This blizzard did a good job of shutting down most of Colorado. Every large and small city government, school/university, and business east of the mountains is closed. The airport closed yesterday (Weds) and is not planned to re-open until at least noon on Friday. Every major highway in Colorado is closed…I-25 is closed from Wyoming to New Mexico, I-70 is closed from the Kansas border to the mountains, and on and on.
For more snow pictures, visit my online photo album.


Michael and I have been talking a lot about the possibility of selling out and moving to town. We want to be closer to our friends and our workplaces. We like the idea of being closer to our community. However, this blizzard has got me thinking that right now we are living in a community…a slightly different one than the one we've got in Boulder.

When you live in a pseudo-rural environment, your neighbors become your community. Your neighbors watch over your animals while you're out of town, and you watch over theirs while they are at the state fair. Your neighbors grade the dirt road you all share with their tractors in the summer and plow the dirt road when it snows. You pay a neighbor to cut and bale your hay, and you buy stuff from their kids' school fundraisers. You all own shares of the same ditch, and you meet once a year to talk about the hopes for more water for the coming year.

Today three of our neighbors had out their tractors clearing the dirt road all the way to the highway. One of them even helped us dig out our driveway. Michael and I spent several hours helping out another neighbor that needed help getting paths dug to her hay and to all the animals on her property. We know that there are a lot of people on our little street that we can call on if we need help.

Big Snow #3

If you can believe it, we got big snow #3 on Friday, Jan 5...Another 9-10 inches at the house.

Michael had re-shoveled all the paths to feed the animals on Friday morning before we left to head to Boulder. Turned out my work was closed because of the snow storm, so I headed back home. By the time I got home at 11am, I had to shovel the entrance to the garage to get the truck in it!

Michael went in to work on Saturday morning, so I shoveled the path to the hay barn (again). While I was shoveling I started singing to myself a little song about how the winter would be a long one if I had to shovel the same path over and over to the haybarn. I got a good workout in the morning between the shoveling and hay-bale carrying (another 150 pound of hay carried by woman power!) During the hour I was outside, the temperature raised from 13 to 23 degrees!

We got hefty winds Saturday night, and all that snow was blowing everywhere. This morning all our paths were invisible again under the snow...so we got to dig out once more! All the lovely shoveling I had done to clear out the path to the garage had been un-done by the winds!

I tell you, this is going to be a long, long winter.

How I spent winter break

Winter break came early this year because of the Blizzard. I had 2.5 extra days off. Looking back at what I did over the "break" I am startled to see how little "break" there was.

Weds 12/20 the blizzard hit. I left work at 11:30am and got home from around 1pm, worked on making paths to the animals to feed them and shoveled for another hour before I finally had lunch. Once Michael came home, we spent another 2 hours shoveling so that we could get the truck into the garage since the gate to the back was completely blocked by a 3-foot snow drift.

Thurs 12/21. It had continued to snow through the night, and the paths we had made were completely covered. Our neighbor Lynley runs a llama rescue and has about 200 animals on her property. She's a single mom and called us up asking for help to dig paths so she could get food to her animals. We were at her house shoveling for 2 hours. We came home, ate lunch, and then spent another 3 hours re-digging paths to our animals to feed them. This much snow was so different than anything Michael and I had ever experienced before—it was FUN to do all that shoveling!

Fri 12/22. Michael went to work and I spent the day cleaning the house and doing laundry. My parents and sister were scheduled to arrive on 12/28, and thought it would be a good chance to start picking up. In the afternoon, I got a frantic call from Lenley that her hay delivery wasn't going to happen, and she didn't have enough hay to get her animals through the Christmas weekend until the hay deliveries would start up again. So all by my farmer-jennie self, I dug through 3-foot snow drifts to get to the hay barn and then carried hay bales to the porch. Once I had gotten 3 bales to the porch, I realized that to load them in the truck, I would need to shovel out the gate that separates the driveway from the back of the property. When Michael finally came home, I hadn't been able to dig enough—my arms were totally fatigued. I had a melt-down when he came home, but was able to find a little more strength in my arms to put bales that he carried to the porch into a wheelbarrow and could push the wheelbarrow through the house and into the garage so we could load the bales into the truck.

Sat 12/23. While Michael was in Boulder the day before, he borrowed snowshoes from our friends Matt and Sara. We snow-shoed to the back of the pasture and had a fun time flopping in the snow making snow angels. We then shoveled the driveway for a few hours and carved out a 6' tall snowman from the drift in front of the garage. When we finally came inside in the late afternoon, I found out that my dad decided to stop all the treatment on my grandma.

Sun 12/24. My grandma Betty died.

Mon 12/25. Michael celebrates Christmas, so we prepared a Christmas dinner and our friends Matt and Sara came over. The highlight of the day...I made cheese! Yes, I'll say it again, I made cheese!

Tues 12/26. Woke up at 4:20 am to make an early morning flight to St. Louis, Missouri for my grandma's funeral. Flew back to Colorado that evening and was home by 11pm. A long, hard day.

Weds 12/27. While I was in St. Louis, Michael made plans for us to haul unsold Christmas trees from a place in Boulder to our neighbor Lynley's house. Michael drove the truck with a 16 foot flatbed trailer attached down to Boulder, while I followed in the Prius. We got there a little before 8am and the two of us and the farmer and a helper filled the bed of the truck and the trailer to a height of approximately 7 feet high. Michael went to work and I drove the full rig back to Lynley's. She and I then dug out the 18-foot trailer and I hooked it up and drove it back down to Boulder. Repeated the fill, and drove the second load to her house! Can you believe, this took nearly all day. I never realized that carrying all those trees was such hard work!

Thurs 12/28. The second snow hit in the afternoon. I spent the morning pulling out hay and getting the critters all situated since they were predicting another 1 or 2 feet of snow...fortunately only 8 inches at the house, and no drifts since there was no wind with this storm. I was crashed out for the second half of the day...wouldn't you be after all that happened the few days prior?

Fri 12/29. Spent most of the day shoveling out. While we were lucky to "only" get 8 inches, all our paths were covered in 8 inches of snow!

Sat 12/30. The day that the house decided to fall apart...the handrail on the upstairs stairwell pulled out from the wall, the hallway light fixture quit working, and the vacuum quit. Well, they say these things come in threes.

Sun 12/31. New Year's Eve 2006. We spent the day doing a little more shoveling and some picking up around the house. We had dinner with our friends Fern and Jeff and then spent the night at their house ringing in 2007. It was really fun for me to hang out with them for New Year's Eve...a tradition since high school to be together to celebrate.

Mon 1/1. Hung out at Fern and Jeff's for a while in the morning before departing for separate adventures: Michael and Jeff went to fly in the Piper Cub (Jeff has a pilot's license and Michael used to); I bought a new vacuum! Last day of vacation.

My conservative estimate is that I (alone) moved/carried 500 pounds of hay, shoveled 50 cubic feet of snow, and hauled 250 christmas trees across Boulder County. Not a bad accomplishment for winter break. My crazy hubby probably shoveled twice as much snow, though I think we carried an equal number of hay bales!