1966年北达科他州大暴风雪

These days I expect any paragraph of that size to end with nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.

I’m confused?

Wondering the same thing. Pushing through the snow with the yardstick to find the car? How many cars did he start to shovel out before he realized he was at the wrong car? And with that much snow let’s just say there was 6 ft of snow. This guy then shoveled a path wide enough for a car, through six feet of snow? What is the timeline of this story? Like a week? That is an ungodly amount of snow to shovel. Not discrediting OPs story, clearly the state got that much snow. But shoveling a driveway with 10 inches of snow can be back breaking labor. How in the world does one guy shovel 6 ft in a timely manner?

So... I was not alive at the time of that storm. However, I've grown up and lived in similarly cold and snowy places in the plains regions. I have similar questions to you but I think there might be a combination of some misperceptions and misleading storytelling. The key is drifts. It's possible for snow to be very very deep in some places and much much less deep in others. Snow can collect around objects too, so the street could have less snow even while the wind piles it up on a line of parked cars, or a house. The way I imagine explaining this is that his car was buried in snow, and he used a yardstick to move the snow to look at the car roof, but it wasn't like he was poking the stick down through the snow he was walking on, it was like he was swiping a foot of snow off the top of the car, standing on the side, to see the color of the car. Or if he was walking on a drift, the cars themselves were along the edge of the drift, so there was much less snow off to one side than the other (although in that case I don't know why he wouldn't check the cars on the snow-less side). At home, similarly, it might have been possible to reach the roof from one side of the house but not at all the other. That and/or maybe the driveway was really short or something. Or the story is a tall tale.

Something is real fucky about this story.

It's an absurd tall tale. Was waiting for a ride home on a blue ox.

fresh snow is stupidly light, its when it thaws and refreezes is when it gets dense.

Native Fargoan here, my parents lived it and said you get your ass out there throughout the storm so you're never digging that deep and you stomp down a ramp to the top of the piles so you can carry each shovelful as far away from the walk/driveway as you can

And just an FYI, these are telephone lines,not power lines. Most of them were only about 6 ft tall. Still an amazing amount of snow, but I've seen them completely buried in the U.P. lake-affect snow every year (average yearly snowfall of 218inches).

Poor farmers too. Going broke because of a storm. Is there such thing as farming insurance? Edit: Yes, please continue flooding my inbox with the jingle

I mean.... it was kinda flash frozen. I’d give it a shot.

It's not. There was a big blizzard in South Dakota in 2013 I think and tons of cattle died. They were all waste because their organs aren't removed after death. Im sure lots of ranch dogs ate like kings though

But Montana is fucking cold too, no?

In Iowa we call those people dumb because they get caught outside in the cold and end up on the news dead.

High school would be “time to bundle up, steal a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet and go sledding” Now it would be rewatching every planet earth and sleeping

In DC my senior year of HS (09-10) we had two blizzards that each dumped 18"+ of snow. DC doesn't get big snowstorms often enough to invest in serious equipment, so they can't remotely handle a storm of that size. The first one was right before winter break, so we got 3 extra days off before break started. But the second one in February was insane. The forecast was so bad that they closed school preemptively the Thursday it hit, even though it didn't end up having any serious accumulation until late that night. We ended up getting Friday and *the entire next week* off of school. I was having a particularly miserable time with school that year, and this snowstorm was the greatest relief of my life. We had a repeat in my 20s living downtown instead of in the suburbs, and it was just as surreal. Everyone got off of work for a few days, and I hiked 2 miles or so down the middle of Massachusetts Ave (one of the biggest arteries in the city) to get brunch with friends at the one place that was open. There were no cars out and just a couple small groups of people heading to the Capitol to go sledding. Felt like the city was abandoned after the apocalypse. Man I miss snow.

Back then you had to worry about being glassed in real life

What about us braindead slobs?

What are other ones? I love this kind of stuff

Is that really a thing? I've always heard people say it's too cold to snow. I've also heard a meteorologist say that it's not true.

Do you generally use trains as a frame of measure ?

I've lived in North Dakota those are not typical height poles. Look at the background. That is likely 6 ft or so of snow. Google search short telephone poles. They're all over the place in bumfuck nowhere. No reason to have 20 ft poles when there's no buildings to go over. So they keep em short. Also, theres like zero fucking trees in North Dakota. That's why they say in North Dakota there's a pretty girl behind every tree.

Son of a bench.

You're pickin up what I was puttin down.

Electricity wasn't as dangerous back then.

Lmao, I do. Last week when it was close to -50 with the windchill almost everywhere in town was shut down for the day, but not my job (I don't work for any type of emergency services, not even close). Car wouldn't start because of the cold and there wasn't another way to get there. Had to talk with my sup about "what I could have done different to avoid missing work". That being said my sup thought it was pretty dumb too, but their boss made them.

How much in trains.