I've been thinking about some of the greatest blizzards of the American West. In 1886, in 1922, in 1969 -- weather events that shifted the course of entire communities in an afternoon. You hear passed down stories about the twenty feet of snow that fell in rural Montana, burying fields, killing hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. Snow wiped out financial futures like a stock market crash. The wind whipped around the flakes to the point you couldn't see a few yards in front of you: all air was suddenly opaque. If you were caught outside, stumbling blindly, missing your barn or house or outhouse by a couple feet would kill you.
These kinds of stories have always fascinated me in a grim way. They seem like an old-fashioned phenomenon, a Little House on the Prairie plot device, or like when modern dentistry was just replacing your teeth with the teeth of cows.
Turns out living in Southeast Alaska just gives you a really bad idea of what snow can be like. Even going to college in Minnesota, land of the Polar Vortex, doesn't do it justice.
Credit where it's due: terrifying, impenetrable snow is a modern reality, north of the Arctic Circle. They're not even century markers. They're just the thing that keeps you from riding to camp on the weekend, so you bundle up with some friends and toddle around outside for awhile, before warming up your stinging faces by the fire.
