Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2026/01/21/very-snowy-place/

by surprisetalk • 6 months ago

311 333 6 months ago

slillibri• 5 months ago

The main lesson I learned was I didn’t have to live in a snowy place. I left SW Michigan in 2000 and haven’t looked back. I don’t like being cold, but I loathe snow and ice.

richiezc• 5 months ago

+1 I grew up in CA, went to college in IL and couldn't move back fast enough!

mattikl• 5 months ago

I've lived all my life in Finland, even though all through my early adulthood I was planning to move to some place much warmer. But later (especially now with children for whom the snow is so exciting) I've come to like the four seasons and the balance it gives.

That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.

euroderf2• 5 months ago

Yes but then in spring come the freeze-thaw cycles that make every town a skating rink. Sand & grit barely rate as halfway measures. More-aggressive snow removal and pavement scraping would help.

I've been obsessed longtime about how (or, better: whether) robots could remove the ice from pavements, but I only see tech challenge after tech challenge.

indoordin0saur• 5 months ago

That article was a strange read from my perspective, because here the infrastructure is built for winters as well. I don't remember school ever being canceled due to winter conditions, traffic is only a mess after a snowstorm.

Seems like the author lives in a rural area where there isn't the support to deal with heavy snow. Also, Finland has frequent snow that falls in small amounts. I'm not sure exactly where the author is, but some mountainous or lake-adjacent areas in the US and Canada the snow falls less frequently but when it does it can come very heavy, like a meter of the stuff in 48 hours is not uncommon which is more than Helsinki usually gets in an entire winter. In Buffalo, NY for example a few years back they got 2 meters in a single day.

ozim• 5 months ago

I hate bugs, I specifically like late autumn/winter/early spring cold times because there are almost no bugs. I don't mind snow/ice as much.

Tor35• 5 months ago

Cold and dry is not a problem. You can always add more layers of clothing and get very comfortable.

Warm and humid is a real problem. You can't just remove clothing until you're comfortable. And the humidity.. there's no remedy to fix that.

wellf3• 5 months ago

The remedy is swim or air conditioning.

00N8• 5 months ago

Good point. I've always found high humidity makes things a lot more unpleasant unless the temperature is in a fairly narrow range around 71°F or so. It intensifies the heat of course, but IME it also makes chilly weather a lot harsher too. I get uncomfortably cold really easily when it's e.g. 51°F with a cool damp ocean breeze in places like SF or Monterey, but when I go to the mountains in winter, 25-32°F is totally comfortable -- even in literally the same clothing. I think it must be partly a psychological effect, but humidity seems to play a role too (along with other factors like IR reflection off the snow).

wffurr2• 5 months ago

Just before the Superbowl, the Boston Globe had an article full of interviews with New Englanders who have moved to California. One claimed to still be a New Englander but didn't miss the weather, "I haven't slipped on ice in 30 years". I had to think, are they really New Englanders if they can't handle the weather? I think that's a big part of it. Having some Patriots and Dunkin Donuts swag doesn't cut it IMO.

N_Lens• 5 months ago

I think this trend of writing in the second person needs to mature into a more accurate first person account. It’s an immature human tendency to universalise one’s experience, and it takes maturity to see that situations are different from context to context. A lot of this article doesn't seem to generalize to every snowy place on the planet.

brettgriffin• 5 months ago

Put winter tires on your vehicles. I'm surprised by the number of people who tool around in snow and ice in 'all season' tires.

Also, that writing tone is obnoxious.

bigstrat20032• 5 months ago

Eh, all seasons do you just fine. Not worth the effort to put winter tires on, imo.

antupis• 5 months ago

Difference is pretty big if it’s icy like breaking 100 meters vs 10 meters. Especially if there’s wildlife like reindeers/moose’s you are going to do emergency breathing semi regularly.

joecool10294• 5 months ago

You’re right usually (about not needing blizzaks) but there’s important nuance here. There are warm all season (with usual M+S stamped on, this just means tread pattern, nothing about compound) and winter all-season with a compatible compound for cold conditions. The industry created a logo for the tires some years back it’s like 3 peak mountain snowflake or something. This ensures the compound is soft enough to keep gripping in freezing temperatures. It’s required in some jurisdictions (Quebec I think and maybe some lake effect zones)

qixv• 5 months ago

I find it quite funny. I read it as if he is obnoxious towards himself, because the lessons presented are learned the hard way.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

I'm in the foothills in Northern California, and I've never met anyone here that changes their ties out for winter. When there's chain controls, they'll let you through if you have winter rated tires, including all-season, and all-wheel drive, otherwise you need chains.

Everyone I know who drives a lot in the snow gets a vehicle with all-wheel drive and everyone else carries chains. (really they're cables, on a small vehicle)

The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.

I've only heard of people changing their tires on the Midwest, where snowfalls are in the inches, not feet.

brabel2• 5 months ago

Interesting, here in Sweden it’s mandatory to change tires. Once I did it a bit late and drove on some ice, just a little. The car was like on ice skates for a little while .

dboreham3• 5 months ago

Montana here. Everyone that can afford to changes their tires. Costco tire center is a s.show in November and May. Nobody uses chains except for un-maintained roads. Obviously nobody buys a 2WD vehicle here.

jjav4• 5 months ago

The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting.

Yeah.. no. The difference is night and day.

Put on some Nokian Hakkapeliitta tires and prepare to be amazed. The grip on snow is spectacular.

All the years I lived in snow areas I drove a Miata of all things.. RWD, light, no ABS, no TC, 4" clearance. But with Hakkapeliitta tires I never once had any trouble, while people in their trucks and 4x4s were stuck on the side of the road due to all-season tires. A true snow tire is a whole different level.

Northern California ... chain controls

The whole California chain thing is brain damage. The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.

A car with Hakkapeliittas (Blizzaks are good too) will outhandle a car with chains 100% of the time.

philistine• 5 months ago

You’re dangerously wrong. Winter tires make a very large difference in braking. If they’re so inconsequential, why are they mandatory in many northern places?

Culture has an impact on what people choose to do. I’ve seen so many Americans with your point of view. It’s maddening. Winter tires save lives!

kevin_thibedeau• 5 months ago

All-season tires are not winter rated. They are 3.5 season at best. True winter usage only exists in all-weather or snow tires with the 3PMS symbols.

kyralis• 5 months ago

As others have said, this is very wrong. I live in Vermont an Duse "all season" tires as my summer tires on both my Subaru and my 4wd truck. I absolutely change to winter tires on both vehicles (studded, on the truck), and the difference in snowy conditions is night and day.

rypskar• 5 months ago

All-wheel drive doesn't help you at all where it is most important, and that is in braking. Having all-wheel drive only helps you get up to a dangerous speed faster when the grip is low

newsclues• 5 months ago

No, the rubber compound in winter tires are vastly superior to all seasons on snow/ice, it helps you actually control the vehicle.

I’ve shoveled meters of snowfall this year, our roads are just packed down snow, no pavement.

triceratops• 5 months ago

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/12/01/all-wheel-drive-d...

FTA:

"If anyone gets an AWD vehicle “for safety” but uses it with all-season tires, they have performed a Consumer Sucka Fail. A front wheel drive vehicle with snow tires would have more grip.

According to this Consumer Reports test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXjzYbpt9Ow) on snow tires vs. AWD, the tires were by far the most important factor. And only 12% of AWD vehicle owners bothered to put snow tires on their vehicle, meaning 88% of all-wheel-drive vehicle purchases were wasted, because the drivers could have achieved better performance at lower cost in a front-wheeler with snow tires."

rconti• 5 months ago

The difference between what winter-only tires can handle vs winter-rated all-season tires is so minimal that they're not with getting. Chance ate conditions are either fine for the all-season tie or there so bad that the difference is inconsequential and you need all-wheel drive or chains.

You couldn't be more wrong.

esmIII• 5 months ago

I went to school at Michigan Tech where we would regularly get over 300 inches in the winter. I drove a Honda civic with snow tires. It was fine even on steep slopes. Winter tires keep you from loosing traction and sliding off the road. AWD helps you get back on the road after you slide off.

shaky-carrousel• 5 months ago

The writing tone is obviously self-deprecating.

xxs2• 5 months ago

Around this parts of Europe, they are mandatory.

fulafel2• 5 months ago

A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?

yxhuvud2• 5 months ago

Trees fall down due to combination of heavy snow and wind. They probably don't cut sufficiently around power lines. It is extra bad if the ground hasn't frozen properly yet.

In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.

ndndndndj• 5 months ago

But why are power lines above ground in the first place?

bigstrat20032• 5 months ago

I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.

pests2• 5 months ago

Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.

I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.

Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.

joecool10294• 5 months ago

I live very near a hospital

Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.

I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.

friendzis• 5 months ago

I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.

curation• 5 months ago

I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.

It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.

qingcharles4• 5 months ago

I live in literally the middle of nowhere and get very bad winters but I lose power less often than I ever did living in the center of Chicago which often lost power for days at a time due to the weather.

pettertb• 5 months ago

If you can't drive anywhere, chances are the people who fix electricity grids will struggle too. And snow storms can fuck with infrastructure..

Less of an issue in areas where people do get around no matter the snowfall tho.

bregma• 5 months ago

I live in the back woods of Canada. We get a lot of snow. Our electrical supply (we call it "hydro") can disappear for long periods of time. The usual suspects are:

1. Ice storms. 3 inches (8 cm) of ice build up on trees can cause them to either drop limbs or deadfall into wires. It can be spectacular to see. Sparky.

2. The first heavy snowfall of the year can cause problems because although trees are trimmed every few years, they can grow pretty fast and either arch over the wires or are now tall enough to deadfall on the wires. By the time the later heavy snowfalls have come the danger trees have already dangered. The worst trees for this are the pines and spruces (and hemlocks and cedars but don't tend to grow as tall) since their boughs catch the snow and their new wood is actually pretty weak.

3. Drivers losing control. Doing 20 over the posted limit and passing a plow while the roads are greasy and visibility poor often results in taking out one or more poles while converting yourself into a casualty.

One large factor here is not that it takes a crew long to restore the lines, it's that the problems tend to occur in many sports over a large geographic region. There are only so many crews on shift and more remote places can be forced to wait for days while the townies get services right away. Our power was off one spring for three weeks a few years back after a derecho passed through a strip about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. I'm still burning the wood for heat.

So, yeah, it's normal. Doesn't matter how good your make your infrastructure, nature is harsher.

yxhuvud2• 5 months ago

8: that's why you have sharper slopes on the roof if you expect a lot of snow. Then it glide off.

We have to get our city house roof shoveled, but it is more making certain it don't fall on top of someone.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

It can also be structural. Depending on the elevation, my county mandates houses be designed to survive wind speeds up to 157 miles per hour and snow loads up to 545 pounds per square foot. That means a flat roof would have to be built like a parking garage floor, but a sloped roof can transfer that weight to the exterior walls, and an true A-frame directly transfers the load to the ground.

jmspring3• 5 months ago

I spent 7 years living in an area with 1m acre fires, winters that were 4 feet in april and nothing in december. Having a house setup where you have multiple heat sources - important. My fireplace had a fan and my kerosene heater was pretty low maintenance as well - a honda 2200 generator under the eaves - only needed once.

UPSs for power outages.

Chest freezer - put those 1 gallon crystal springs (if in western us) jugs in to have ice blocks.

Have warm clothing. If you live in an HOA, be on top of them plowing both common areas and walk ways (mine was supposed to, FedEx/UPS/DHL all let me know - the walkway couldn't be an ice sheet).

Ensure you have access to a vehicle to get your to the services you need.

jmspring3• 5 months ago

I hated the reference to burning man. Most burning man people I have dealt with don't plan long term (aside from the event) and the long term planning they do have - isn't usually at their home.

jmspring3• 5 months ago

For context, I was born/raised SF Bay Area. Moved to Plumas County (north of Truckee) in 2017 for about 8 years. Didn't mind the snow - have a tacoma trd off road. The electric coop was amazeballs even when PGE tried to screw with them. I've since moved. I like rural - but the wild fires and trumptopia kinda soured me.

I live on an island now with a driveway that has 15-20 degree slope. It snows rarely, but garage is insulated and I need to get a heater near the water pipes. It snowed the one day I had to get to the ferry at 650am for jury duty. I'm glad I had the TRD - it wasn't much but waking up to - doo-dee-doo - drive to ferry and unexpected 2" of snow...causes some anxeity.

hysan2• 5 months ago

Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).

vl• 5 months ago

I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.

fwipsy2• 5 months ago

It's not really meant to be advice. It's the author's own experience, ironically written as if it were advice.

For example:

"You did bleach ten gallons of well water for long-term storage already earlier in the year, right? Good."

This is sarcasm, because the author did not do that.

hysan2• 5 months ago

Ah I see. That didn’t translate well for me. Maybe because the title primed me into thinking that this was meant to be helpful.

dboreham3• 5 months ago

Perhaps it's an AI generated article. A real human would have realized quite quickly that you can put snow into the tank of a toilet when the power is out.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

This is a common reaction to posts on the internet, including blogs and Hacker News comments.

qingcharles4• 5 months ago

I just learned first hand what to do with frozen pipes. Couldn't stop it this year as it went so far below zero. On the last day before it warmed up one of the pipes split and put about 2ft of water into the basement. Amazing to see the damage to the CPVC pipe that broke -- like it literally exploded, which it probably did.

codingdave• 5 months ago

You should have a shutoff valve on every pipe that goes through an external wall. Before bitter cold like that, turn off the valve and drain that pipe. If it is supplying an outdoor spigot, that shutoff should just be part of your winter prep.

(And yes - I, too, learned that the hard way.)

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

The entire article is half-assed assumptions mixed with common sense. The only lesson is to prepare before the snow season arrives or suffer.

fransje264• 5 months ago

It can rub a reader the wrong way because it is written in a sarcastic tone to self-reflect on things the author did wrong or didn't do.

Every piece of "advice" and patronizing questioning, such as "You did that, right? Right?", is a self-reflection by the author on things she should have done but didn't do, and learned that the hard way. It is not meant to be a patronizing statement to the the reader, but it is rather self-depreciation.

computerdork4• 5 months ago

Moved a year ago from California to northern Michigan. To add to this list, specifically regarding "Do NOT get wet and cold":

o If you're walking out in the cold, have many different ways to keep your feet and your hands warm, because usually, you'll have a good-enough coat and winter-pants that'll keep your core relatively warm, but it's the very ends of your extremities that get cold (just got a small amount of frost bite on my toes the other day).

o On top of really thick gloves and socks, can buy some battery-heated versions of both. These aren't just gimmicks, they work wonders! As do the standard handwarmers and toewarmers

o Get real winter boots, these are water proof and insulated, so your feet won't get wet, and will resist the cold for longer (didn't learn this one until recently. Yeah, once your shoes get wet enough to bleed into your socks, you feet start to freeze).

o For your head and neck, carry one of those head and neck covers with you in your coat pocket (called a balaclava). Because sometimes you misread the weather and suddenly you've got a 5 degree wind chill streaming over your neck and face.

o etc:)

And, actually, walking in the snow is really nice (so clean and pure), which is why a lot of us here do actually go outside.

oldestofsports• 5 months ago

This guy has mastered the art of dressing for winter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG3WfCWU9D0

internet_points2• 5 months ago

battery-heated versions

all the ones I've seen when researching were lithium-ion from sketchy-looking brands, any brands you recommend?

bradfa2• 5 months ago

Any sold at a physical ski shop. You will make a face at the price. You will reconsider the sketchy ones for their price. But the ski shop ones will last significantly longer.

computerdork4• 5 months ago

Yeah, am sure these the cheap brands don’t have good batteries. But, have found after a year of using them, they are usually good enough. Unless you’re doing something like ice fishing, almost all outdoor activities take about 1-4 hours, and they last about 4-5 hours on a mix of high/medium. Have only run out a couple of times, and that’s because I was lazy and didn’t charge them before going out. Also, the battery type used for almost all these heated devices is the same, 7.4 volts. Have bought a couple pairs of replacements that also work pretty well (and have bought ones with larger storage capacities as well as smaller ones for skiing as I don’t want the extra bulk). The brand of heated socks I’ve tried are the ones recommended online, Snow Deer and Dr Warm.

Snow Deer have better electronics: The main button requires you to hold it down in order to turn it off and on. This is big deal because it’s easy to accidentally press the button when you’re out and about. But, unlike what all the review say, I find them uncomfortable. They have a piece of wiring that runs along the top of the foot that digs in (and have tried two different pairs, same thing. Have returned them both).

Dr. Warm is more comfortable (not perfect, but for hiking, good enough). But the problem is the main button doesn’t require a long press to turn them off, so sometimes, you’ll find they’ve turned off by accident (or more importantly, turned on and you’ve drained the battery). Still, comfort is more important, and there are ways to get around the button issue, so these are the ones I use daily - will keep the batteries unplugged until needed.

And like someone else said, if all else fails, get a nicer brand, one that is $200+.

degosuke• 5 months ago

Any recommendations about the boots? Or what to check for?

cess114• 5 months ago

I prefer military boots, they have no branding and are typically designed and tested for decent longevity and comfort. My current ones are Bundeswehr surplus, I believe Meindl produced them. They cost about 60 euros or so, never been used.

Pick a size larger than you would usually do, unless they're explicitly designed as winter boots. In cold weather you'll want wool socks as well as regular socks and that requires some extra space.

nxtbl• 5 months ago

There are many brands making proper shoes/boots for winter hiking. I would recommend taking a look at Haix, Lowa, Salomon Quest series, Lundhags and Meindl.

joshvm• 5 months ago

Baffin make some of the best cold weather boots. We use them in Antarctica, though you probably don't want the chonky -70C rated ones. I have some lighter boots rated for about -40 and they're great. Really any good gore tex mid-ankle hiking boot is probably fine. Whether you need cold rated boots is going to depend on where you're walking.

Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.

If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.

Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.

Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.

Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.

balderdash• 5 months ago

The key word you’re looking for is a "pac boot" depending on where you live you can get insulated, but honestly unless your live somewhere super cold and snowy, you probably don't need insulation. if you put on warm socks, keep snow out of them, are moving around, and aren't outside for hours on end you'll probably be fine even in really cold weather.

SAI_Peregrinus• 5 months ago

Ryan Tilley (an AMGA-certified mountain guide) has a long and detailed guide of different sorts of boots and what to look for in each type[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFKC0BynjxY

nosrepa• 5 months ago

A buff works pretty well instead of a balaclava and can serve the same purpose and more. Essentially just a tube of stretchy fabric that you can wear around your neck and pull up into a close enough approximation of a balaclava.

ghtbircshotbe• 5 months ago

Get boots a size too big to wear multiple layers of wool socks.

mc_maurer2• 5 months ago

A big thing I would add is to strongly consider how much you'll be moving, especially when it comes to footwear.

Boots that are rated to -40 during light activity can leave you with cold toes if you're standing still in -10 for an hour.

Activity levels also dictate how you layer and how easily you need to dump heat. If you're hiking, snowshoeing, XC skiing, you want some layers with zips so you can quickly let heat out.

PyWoody2• 5 months ago

Also remember to watch your sweat levels. As soon as you start sweating, start shedding layers to bring your core temp down.

phil213• 5 months ago

thick gloves

Gloves are not for severe cold. They are for dexterity during limited exposure time - as no gloves can keep your fingers warm for very long no matter how well-made they are.

Look for mittens or "choppers" as we called them back in the day if you are going to be outside for a long period of time. These are outer shells (leather or gore-tex/etc.) with various types of removable liners. You basically layer your hands inside them. For folks outside all day you usually would have a few liners on hand to replace when they get wet.

Add a heat pack (iron oxide) to these on those super cold days and you'll be pretty much set.

computerdork4• 5 months ago

Good reminder. Actually, I’m there with you, already have mittens, and they are warmer than my gloves (although, my fingers still get cold, even in them).

But also, kind of don’t like how they make me look like a teenager, and I already look young for my age, don’t need any help in this department:) have been trying to find a glove-solution that is still warm. Have just tried some heated gloves, they seem pretty good, but early still

m463• 5 months ago

socks

darn tough socks. I have these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XG34G8

your feet will be warm and dry, even when exercising, wet, etc.

They work super hot summer and cold winter.

yokoprime• 5 months ago

In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable

Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.

colechristensen3• 5 months ago

Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.

nxpnsv• 5 months ago

We have above ground power lines in the nordics too. They are just built to handle our climate.

mzi• 5 months ago

In the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.

watwut• 5 months ago

That is bad infrastructure problem. Not a necessary feature. Near freezing should be non issue.

LeafItAlone• 5 months ago

I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

My parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines.

They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

westpfelia• 5 months ago

Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.

Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.

fwsgonzo2• 5 months ago

Same here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing.

Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.

cwillu• 5 months ago

Yeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.

da_chicken• 5 months ago

I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.

coffeebeqn• 5 months ago

Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow

throwaway290• 5 months ago

Even in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked...

That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely

inglor_cz2• 5 months ago

Or somewhere remote. Czechia is a small country with a well-developed grid and nothing here is really "remote" compared to, say, Alaska.

But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.

It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.

throwaway173738• 5 months ago

In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area. I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma

I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.

dboreham3• 5 months ago

Even a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.

mannykannot• 5 months ago

I guess you probably don’t live in Texas, then!

sgt• 5 months ago

A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.

eitland• 5 months ago

It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.

I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.

We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.

The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.

b112• 5 months ago

Likely city vs rural.

cess114• 5 months ago

In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.

In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.

When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.

silcoon• 5 months ago

I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.

So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.

Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).

rgmerk• 5 months ago

Worth keeping in mind that nobody freezes to death in FNQ if the power goes out.

theothertimcook• 5 months ago

"she'll be right" =/= "it's gonna be fine"

More of a it's not going to be fine but we will deal with it.

1000+KMs away in/not far from the capital city of Queensland it's not unheard of to have a multi-day power outage after a severe storm.

Considering QLD is almost 6x the size of Norway it's not actually that bad.

DrBazza• 5 months ago

We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.

How does that compare to Norway?

thaumasiotes• 5 months ago

https://satwcomic.com/you-re-hot-then-you-re-cold

Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.

This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.

(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

Snow isn't inherently the villain; mediocre infrastructure is

emeril• 5 months ago

Norway is probably one of the better managed countries on earth

wasmainiac3• 5 months ago

I like it, but your statement is an generalisation.

boringg2• 5 months ago

This article is a bit painful to read. It should be lessons from living in the remote wildnerness in winter. Pretty much all those problems are relative to rural infrastructure and poor home building. If you live in an area with heavy snow load you want an A-frame roof to de-load the roof (for example see: Tahoe, CA ~ 500-800" snow a year).

citrin_ru2• 5 months ago

A-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.

ctoa• 5 months ago

Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.

I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.

But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.

dathinab6• 5 months ago

This isn't fully true.

Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble.

EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof.

And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.

Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.

Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.

PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.

waffletower2• 5 months ago

You'll even find ubiquitous A-frames in Southern California in mountain ranges. Crestline, Arrowhead, Big Bear, etc.

greenie_beans• 5 months ago

imagine finding this painful to read because it doesn't describe your world

tjohns• 5 months ago

The part about power outages is certainly true in Tahoe. I grew up there and remember a week-long power outage as a kid, since the snow took out the feeder lines from both CA and NV simultaneously.

Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.

ghc3• 5 months ago

living in New England, I have also never heard of this and I don't think it's understandable at all. Trees are pruned around power lines for a reason.

ghaff2• 5 months ago

Live in ex-urban MA and it’s not common but have had a couple of multi-day power outages in both winter and summer over the decades I’ve lived here. Don’t remember the details of the summer outage but the winter one was a massive ice storm.

dd822• 5 months ago

come up to maine and see how much pruning the power companies do. there's a reason high wind and heavy snow storms trash power lines

bitbckt• 5 months ago

Multiple day outages in Winter are not unusual in our part of Maine. Nearly everyone has a whole home generator for good reason.

jjtheblunt• 5 months ago

growing up in chicagoland when it snowed blizzard level often with lots of accumulation (70s, 80s), the power never went off, to your point also.

titzer• 5 months ago

Losing power is highly correlated with above-ground power lines. Who'd a thunk that.

cucumber3732842• 5 months ago

As much as a bunch of people on HN want to attribute this to European superiority or tax rate or investment or whatever, it's not. It's just a willingness to maintain things and not let idiots with no real problems roadblock the process.

I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.

My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.

I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.

nancyminusone3• 5 months ago

Rural-ish Michigan here. It doesn't happen most years, and almost never in winter, but it can. It seems to happen a lot less than when I was a kid.

Regardless, "my power never goes out" isn't a great plan for what to do if your power goes out. Ask Texas, they once thought the same.

pastage2• 5 months ago

Might be all of that infrastructure paid by oil, on the other side of the border in a not that remote of an area (10people/km²). We have absolutely had power outages lasting several days.

mikestew2• 5 months ago

I grew up in the middle of nowhere Midwest (where it snows plenty), and our electricity came from a rural co-op ("rural co-ops", because no one else is going to drag electrical wires out here, so we'll do it ourselves). We rarely lost power, the infrastructure where the TFA author lives just sucks.

Sharlin2• 5 months ago

Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.

Maakuth• 5 months ago

Since the Tapani storm of 2011 there's been a massive undergrounding of the power grid, so much of the rural areas are now also quite safe from outages. But there are still a lot of the old type of grid left and the economics for undergrounding those are increasingly unfavorable. Perhaps grid connected batteries next to the transformers might soon be more economical for many of these areas. They could serve other functions beside backup power, after all.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 5 months ago

Indiana here. Power outages due to fallen tree limbs, frozen trees "exploding", ice accumulation on lines, etc. is fairly common.

It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that).

https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...

bombcar2• 5 months ago

It’s not really a question of urban/rural but more a question of “buried transmission lines” or not.

We have buried lines and have few if any power issues. richer town a bit over does not, and loses power once a winter or so.

wasmainiac3• 5 months ago

Also live in Norway, nord Trøndelag. Power went out 3 timeslast year, few times for days, but that was an unusual winter. This years it’s only gone out for a few hours.

Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.

dathinab6• 5 months ago

ironically sometimes warmer winters are worse

like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C then a warmer winter would have

- more black ice

- more ice rain

- more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.)

- wetter snow (so heavier)

etc.

Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

This is largely true in places with above ground power lines, like the US. I happen to live in an area with buried lines and have never actually lost power due to snow.

dathinab6• 5 months ago

It's pretty much a "countries with bad infrastructure" problem.

But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.

Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).

goalieca• 5 months ago

Canada here, and it's gone out in winter. Not normal during snow storm but very common during ice storms.

krzyk• 5 months ago

In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable but you do have to think about it beforehand.

Power going is last thing I would think happens in such place. I understand wind, but snow? I get that rural places might get power cables in the air, but in cities those should go underground.

I live in rural area, close to big city in a semi snowy place (depends on winter), in the last 10 years power went out only when constructions workers cut it out because they had to do some work on them.

colechristensen3• 5 months ago

Ice on power lines. It's the freezing rain mix in just the right conditions that builds up ice on anything and takes down lines.

qingcharles4• 5 months ago

All the damned power lines in Chicago seem to be above ground on poles in the alleys. They were always breaking. It was infuriating coming from a place with buried lines.

rags2riches• 5 months ago

If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.

internet_points2• 5 months ago

+1, I learnt too late how useful a brush is, also for clearing small puffy snowfalls much faster than shovelling

Quothling• 5 months ago

24. Check your attic. If snow blows in there because your roof is damaged then it will melt and slowly turn your entire house into fungi. The damage to your roof can be so tiny you wouldn't spot it and your attic could still fill up during a snow storm.

It should frankly be nr 1. At least if you ask any Scandinavian dad.

Marsymars2• 5 months ago

This is a concern of mine, and my attics (3 of them due to the way the house is built) are pretty inconvenient to check, so I put some battery-powered temp/humidity sensors in them.

Haven't gotten around to setting up any alerting thresholds though... I'm not actually entirely sure what temp/humidity thresholds would actually be useful.

deltoidmaximus3• 5 months ago

Maybe you could put a camera up there to check for snow. Not sure how you'd power it if it was wireless though, not a lot of solar energy in an attic.

yakshaving_jgt• 5 months ago

I've spent the past month in the mountains in Ukraine, and it's been as low as -18ºC at times. Terrorists from russia have repeatedly knocked out power generation, and so on many days we have very little access to electricity in the house. Today we have 15.5 hours without power.

During the day, we'll be somewhere where they have a generator. At night, it's cold. But you can somewhat prepare for this. Two or three layers of duvets and blankets, paired with a hot water bottle somewhere in the middle of the bed under the covers will get you through the night.

jader201• 5 months ago

One thing this article doesn’t cover (but probably should): shoveling snow has a fairly high risk of heart attacks (especially past 50):

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/snow-shoveling-can-be-hazard...

delis-thumbs-7e• 5 months ago

I suspect it is because snow storms are fairly rare or at least random and quite a few people do not a) realise they have not done much of any physical exercise for ages b) think shoveling snow is easy, try to do it fast and take too big loads into shovel (which you can with snow, but not with sand). For older people this might mean overexertion and possible seizure, if their cardiovascular health is not well either.

Solution: don’t be a hero. Take breaks. Take smaller shovelfuls. If the first ten shovelfuls are hard, how hard is the 1000th going to be? I live in Finland, are fairly fit and quite strong, but shoveling the car out of thick snow for half an hour is pretty hard work for me. For an older person, it must be double as hard.

stevekemp• 5 months ago

Here in Finland there are a lot of people brought to hospital due to heart attacks whilst shoveling snow.

I didn't expect that, though I can't claim to be surprised by the number of elderly people who go to casualty due to falling on ice.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

Cold weather itself increases the chance of heart attacks. Heat waves get all of the news coverage, but cold weather is the real killer: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Which-Kills-More-People-Ex...

jve• 5 months ago

5. Snow is easiest to shovel when it’s just fallen. The more time passes, the more freeze-thaw cycles – even gentle ones – build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher. (This might be less true in very cold places where it never gets above freezing during the day? I don’t know, honestly.)

If it is very cold and no freeze-thaw cycle, the snow is very... Dry and grainy and still OK for shoveling.

But yes, the puffy stuff just fallen from sky is very nice for shoveling.

keiferski• 5 months ago

I grew up in a snowy place and I still live in one. I tell myself every year that this negative experience “builds character”, that being stuck inside forces one to be more intellectual, read more, etc.

I kind of still believe that story, but as I get older it starts to feel like cope, and the sunny shores of Miami / Spain / Warm Place seem more full of life.

vachina• 5 months ago

starts to feel like cope

In a way you’re right. All the effort to reduce energy usage, go green, the savings are all negated with energy spent on generating heat and emissions.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

Also, sunlight improves your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYnUPxG7ONk

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 5 months ago

instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.

That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.

Tor35• 5 months ago

Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts. I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 5 months ago

I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.

Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.

You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.

My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.

jonasdegendt• 5 months ago

Took a winter trip to Norway once with friends, which included a Norwegian that'd immigrated away to the much milder climate the rest of us were all used to. We got a meter of overnight snow and I'd never seen a person so eager to get shoveling, it took her right back to her childhood. What a machine too, once she got going.

We were dealing with -10C to -20C , but as someone else pointed out my takeaway was that it's really your extremities that you need to think about, there rest of my body was easy to keep warm in comparison. I ended up taking a pair of winter motorcycle gloves I had laying around on the trip, water and wind proof and those worked like a charm with an additional pair of thin, inner gloves, so there's a tip!

I didn't quite nail keeping my feet warm though, but I was wearing regular hiking boots with very thick wool socks. Still felt like I was draining heat to the ground at a rapid rate though.

Stratoscope2• 5 months ago

Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.

About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).

And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.

Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:

24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68

How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc

How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHbsYYELV94

disillusioned• 5 months ago

The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?

Stratoscope2• 5 months ago

It really is something.

Of course, large commercial kitchens often have walk-in refrigerators and walk-in freezers.

In Yakutsk, you have an open-air walk-out freezer.

There are a few months in the summer when temperatures are similar to the Bay Area. I could probably wear my usual aloha shirts!

qingcharles4• 5 months ago

Living in a place that often drops down to insane temps, I am also obsessed with watching the YouTubes from there.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

Once I shoveled some stairs immediately after the first snowfall of the year, on a night well below freezing, and there was a boot print of solid ice frozen onto one of the steps. It's one of the creepiest unexplainable things I've ever seen. I can't think of any way it could have formed, and it was in the middle of a staircase with at least a dozen steps.

My best guess is that, because it was a wooden step, the boot print was permanently imprinted into the step itself, and somehow it had filled with water and frozen before the snowfall.

inglor_cz2• 5 months ago

Aliens. It is always the aliens. And they love to wear Martens.

deltoidmaximus3• 5 months ago

Maybe some one walked up the steps with packed snow on their boot and it came loose on that step and then froze and was snowed on after.

jval432• 5 months ago

Sounds very grim. I live in a snowy part of Europe and very little of this applies, except the stay dry and warm part. Here are 2 things I learned:

1. Do what everyone else does, when they do it. And don't, when they don't. You could die.

There is usually a reason even if you don't understand it right now. You don't want to find out why when you're out in the cold and freezing.

2. Buy gear locally.

There's sometimes reason a certain item is on the shelf and not the stylish one from California, or the super heavy-duty one from Norway. Unfortunately, often this is only obvious in hindsight. Does not depend on price, but it does apply across the board from clothing to cars.

dlcarrier15• 5 months ago

I'm in California. We have good cold-weather gear, you just have to get it from the right kind of store, specifically one that supplies outdoor workers.

jval432• 5 months ago

Maybe California is a bad example. What I'm getting at is the selection for what you need is usually larger and more applicable to the conditions locally.

I see plenty of tourists with winter gear that is either insufficient, or completely over the top. Whereas if you buy locally you'd generally find the right stuff.

wavemode• 5 months ago

One of the big things people don't appreciate enough is the importance of thick, layered, solid winter gear. When reading reviews online "these gloves are so warm!" you really need to interrogate whether the reviewer is from northern Canada or northern California.

shmel• 5 months ago

I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.

steve_gh• 5 months ago

Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.

luigibosco2• 5 months ago

good tip, but gloves are like all season tires! winter = mittens!

SenHeng• 5 months ago

I've found used snowboarding gear is best for when you need to muck around in the snow.

Mittens keep your fingers warm while still letting you handle stuff like shovels and grab at things. You can dig through snow in mittens.

Used snowboard boots tend to be fairly water proof, soft enough that you can walk in them, hard enough that you won't stub your toes and are fairly good at keeping the snow out.

Snowboard pants and jackets are both water _and_ wind proof to keep the weather out. They're baggy so your movement is not restricted. They also have a million pockets so you can carry stuff. Jackets usually have a hoodie so you can put on headphones.

When shovelling snow, don't use a shovel. Use a snow scoop. Push instead of lifting. If you have to use a shovel, use something metallic that easily slices through snow, then push them out of the way with the scoop. Don't lift.

Or get a snow blower.

If your city plows your streets, clear the snow onto the streets just as the plower passes by your house. Then you don't have to get rid of the snow yourself.

jjav4• 5 months ago

The #1 lesson to learn from living in a snowy place, is to move away to a place that does not have that problem!

That's what I did and living on the California coast is much better.

tclancy• 5 months ago

A fun one I only learned recently in spite of having lived with snow all my life: while propane doesn't go liquid until around -80F, the oil pan in the generator needs help somewhere before -40F (and actually that was the wind chill, so it was probably only -20F or so). Thankfully we do have woodstoves, plural.

bigchorizo• 5 months ago

Here's a lifehack my dad taught me. If you have cold feet and no way to warm them - stuff some newspaper (or any kind of paper really) in your boots or socks. Most of the cold comes from moisture and paper is incredibly good at sucking it all up. The difference is huge and instant .

I feel like this trick has saved me from catching a cold on quite a few occassions.

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

Old-school winter hacks tend to be simple physics, not magic

HugoTea• 5 months ago

If they turned out to be magic I'd be more surprised

wnolens• 5 months ago

This advice was also given to me if I ever get caught in the rain while camping and soak my shoes. Bring some newspaper for both a firestarter and for leaving in your shoes overnight, and wake up to dry shoes!

euroderf2• 5 months ago

If the power’s been off for a while, like, over 24 hours, and then suddenly it comes back on for a few minutes, and then it immediately goes out again

This is probably because the average idiot neglects to unplug motors (refrigerator, and other inductive loads), bringing down the network again, entirely unnecessarily.

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

Snow has this way of revealing which parts of your life are decorative and which parts are infrastructure

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 months ago

I suspect most places that experience regular heavy snow, deal well with it.

I have a friend that went to school in Buffalo, NY. That’s a city that experiences “lake effect” snow, during the winter.

He says all the sidewalks are basically “snow gorges,” but the roads clear quickly, and everyone knows how to dress for the cold.

He tells me a story about visiting northern Quebec, one summer, and seeing houses with a second front door, set on the second floor, and was told they were “snow doors,” for deep winter, so folks can get out, when the snow gets deep.

We tend to adapt well.

the_real_cher2• 5 months ago

Is it possible to use a flamethrower instead of a shovel to clear your driveway?

timbit42• 5 months ago

Yes, but it's nowhere near as effective as you might think. Also, due to its ineffectiveness, it ends up costing a LOT of fuel.

Reubachi2• 5 months ago

those handheld propane torches, oft used for weedburning on asphault/concrete, are very good for clearing "post snow clean up ice patches, IE tire treads that iced over, foot prints.

Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane

OkayPhysicist• 5 months ago

The math there gets pretty bad pretty fast. A cubic foot of snow represents ~15 lbs of ice. That corresponds to at 144 BTU to melt a lb of ice, that means you need at a minimum 2160 BTU of fuel (assuming 100% of your heat goes to melting the snow). A gallon of gasoline represents about 114,000 BTU, so each gallon of gas could clear, in a best case scenario where you can capture 100% of the heat, only 50 cubic feet of snow. That's a 10-foot by 10-foot area covered in 6 inches of snow.

But even that's in the dream scenario where somehow your snow is in a sealed, insulated space. In the real world, snow tends to be outside, in the cold air, which is very eager to sink and replace any hot air you make at ground level. So you're losing any heat that warms the air at all. And all that air in the snow makes it a fantastic insulator, meaning the vast majority of your heat isn't going to penetrate.

Interestingly, this same phenomena makes melting snow from underneath much more effective (as the great insulating snow captures the heat). You still need to grapple with the kinda nuts amount of energy it takes to melt ice, but at least you're not wasting 90% of it.

the_real_cher2• 5 months ago

Thank you for the detailed response!

That explains why you dont see more flamethrower driveway clearing services.

thecyborganizer• 5 months ago

xkcd explored this question. too fuel-inefficient to be practical. much better to use that same fuel to run a giant snowblower (and move the snow rather than melt it).

https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/

pedantsamaritan• 5 months ago

Airports push snow into snowmelters. Shipping container sized warming ovens to melt the snow. I've read about at least O'Hare and Logan doing this

cess114• 5 months ago

Regarding 5, the colder it is, the quicker the snow will settle and become hard to shovel by hand. Not like when it thaws and refreezes, but if it is -25 C you'll want to move most of it while it is falling or shortly after. It is likely the snow particles are very small and it will become very dense if allowed to sit for a while.

Regarding 6, you can't shovel snow fast. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Don't use a regular shovel, there are sled-like contraptions that allow you to push the snow around on the ground and that will allow you to bring it further with less effort. Dress appropriately, you don't want to become too sweaty and you are going to figure out an equilibrium where your heat and sweat production stabilises your temperature, or you're going to have to take breaks and on average get less done per unit time.

Regarding 9, if you don't have an axe, get one. In harsh conditions tools are what keep you alive and things like axes and knives are part of the basic equipment you need to have and take good care of. You do not split the wood indoors, do not bring it indoors unless it is split in small enough parts that lighting it will be easy.

Also, you should really avoid using wood that hasn't had good shelter up until time of use. Moist wood will add a lot of soot to your chimney and you are likely not able to clear it yourself, meaning that you run the risk of a chimney fire.

neuroelectron• 5 months ago

5. Snow will still get denser overtime, even if it never gets above freezing. the sunlight will melt it regardless.

mikemarsh• 5 months ago

Beautiful, living in Southern Michigan and dealing with slightly more snow than usual this year, I feel like a wimp compared to some of my snowy-weather compatriots here from Norway, Canada, etc.

Cthulhu_• 5 months ago

If you’re short on kindling, sufficient cardboard CAN be used to light a big log on fire.

Another trick to make kindling, take cardboard or old egg boxes or I suppose kindling wood and dip them in molten candle wax / paraffin.

deltoidmaximus3• 5 months ago

If you're my FIL you just put kerosene on the log first.

graybeardhacker• 5 months ago

I see a lot of people saying "We never lose power, what are you talking about?"

I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.

I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.

827a• 5 months ago

Interesting conversation I had with someone from a semi-warmer climate recently, as they visited: After seeing all the snow on the ground, they commented "wow it must snow all the time here". Me: "Well, we had that big winter storm, when was that, three weeks ago? I don't think its snowed much since then". You can see the gears turning as they come to the realization that snow doesn't, like, go anywhere. If it snows below freezing, that snow stays on the ground. It doesn't melt. The city can move it to more convenient locations, and a very few rich cities have snow melting machines, but most cities don't. Its obvious when you think about it, but if all you're used to is rain its not trivially obvious: The grand snow strategy of most municipalities is "hope it gets warm soon".

pants2• 5 months ago

This is an interesting way to frame it, but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?

The other main ways you lose snow are: sublimation, wind blowing it elsewhere, compaction, and getting dirty (darker color helps it melt in the sun). All of these are relevant for other cities in the snow.

nancyminusone3• 5 months ago

It does, see: Antarctica

sophacles• 5 months ago

Compaction doesn't lose snow. It loses air. This causes the pile of snow to shorten.

dathinab6• 5 months ago

but then the obvious question is, for areas where it almost never gets above freezing, why doesn't the snow get infinitely thick?

this is how glaciers are created

snow getting stuck up, not melting, compressing by weight into much much smaller ice and then more stacking up. And during the last ice age this repeating for a very long time (because snow is mostly air, so the amount of ice you get from it is very little).

The reasons why this isn't too big of an issue on the north/south pool, Antarctica etc. is because this places are also very dry/don't have a lot of snow fall.

To have snowfall you need water in the air. Which mostly comes from heat evaporating water. This doesn't happen in non stop freezing cold places.

So the wind needs to carry the wet air over.

But there is a gradient between hot wet air places and very cold places. So a lot of water rains or snows off before reaching the places where snow doesn't melt.

A large part of the south pool is technically a desert as it has hardly any _new_ snow fall. Just a lot of years old snow getting moved around by wind.

fulafel2• 5 months ago

Glaciers wouldn't get inifinitely thick anyway since they're of finite age, but also they flow out to sea. It happens at a very slow, one might even say glacially slow, pace.

(and the poles are very dry, rarely snows)

testing22321• 5 months ago

I had to fix a wheel bearing on my car in winter, no garage, just in the driveway. I was telling my Aussie dad it’s hard to be outside, lying on the ground etc when the air temp is past about -35.

He said why not wait till the sun comes out and it warms up? The temp only goes up a couple of degrees during the day.

Yukon.

lkuty• 5 months ago

I realized this when I was on vacation in the french alps in summer time and saw a place dedicated for snow storage and labeled as such. I was "what ???" and then the penny dropped and I was impressed by that notion of having to store the snow somewhere since it does not disappear by itself. Funny

bevelwork• 5 months ago

We had a house growing up in Alaska with a steep pitch, and our Dad would get us in trouble for parking the car "too close" to the threshold of the house where the the accumulated snow on the roof could slide of and pound anything in its path.

One day sitting at the dinner table, we heard a giant slide and heard it smash onto the car, and fortunately we found the car keys in my Dad's jacket that night.

standarditem• 5 months ago

The other way to flush a toilet without running water is to fill the tank of the toilet with water, then flush it normally.

gwbas1c2• 5 months ago

I have to 2nd this.

It's significantly easier. I used to do this in the CA drought where I would fill a bucket when waiting for the shower / sink to get hot, and then use the bucket to fill the toilet after I flushed it.

humanpotato• 5 months ago

The only sane way unless you have not enough water to fill the tank. Oh wait, you can fill it with that solid water on the ground, as long as you give it a few hours to melt from the ambient heat in the house between each use.

NoSalt• 5 months ago

Let's have an article on:

"Lessons you will learn living in a place that doesn't regularly get a lot of snow."

I live in Northern Virginia, and ... DAMN, this has absolutely sucked for the past [almost] three weeks.

gwbas1c2• 5 months ago

If you’re short on kindling, sufficient cardboard CAN be used to light a big log on fire.

Fatwood (on Amazon) is amazing for this kind of stuff. It's much easier to start up a wood stove with a few sticks of it than "sufficient cardboard".

(Que the holier-than-thou folks who admonish anyone who has a wood stove.)

threethirtytwo• 5 months ago

24. Live in CA.

gnarlouse• 5 months ago

Push comes to shove

No, no, no!

Push comes to shovel

mikestew2• 5 months ago

I really do hate throwing shade on someone's article, but this reads like one of those "Pearls of Wisdom from Two Years of Junior-Level Software Development". Thanks, person who just a few months ago moved to a snowy, remote area with poor infrastructure, but this is NOT how you flush a toilet with no running water:

"Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl as fast as possible."

No, ya dork, you fill the tank then flush. There were a few other pearls, but no need to pile on. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or perhaps is put off the idea of moving to rustic, romanticized places when they'd be better off elsewhere.

chasd00• 5 months ago

It’s been a while since I had to operate a toilet without water service but what they described only works for the first flush since the tank would be full. After that, the tank is empty and after you fill the bowl, with the tank still empty, there will be barely any gravity assisted flow to “flush”. Makes me think they’ve actually never been in that situation.

micromacrofoot2• 5 months ago

No mention of wool unfortunately, if you've got to be wet and cold... nothing else beats it.

snapetom• 5 months ago

I'll add this - for the love of God, please brush the snow off your car before you drive, especially after a storm.

If it gets above freezing during the day and freezes again at night, the snow will go through a melt/freeze cycle to become a nice thick sheet of ice. I don't know how many times I've seen a 3 inch sheet of ice go flying off a car traveling 70 mph on the Garden State Parkway. This is common sense and it's infuriating how brain dead people are about this. Incidents have killed people before.

Thankfully I've also seen NJ State Troopers hand out tickets for this. I now live in a state, Washington, where the politicians are too busy grandstanding on stupid issues while ice sheets go flying at cars around on the freeway after a snowstorm.

teeray• 5 months ago

Even if your house technically runs on propane, and you have propane, electricity might still run the propane, so your house is going to get cold. Unless you run the woodstove. Which you will

Corollary: don’t buy a house in a place where it snows without two fully independent sources of heat. You want backups. There’s a reason why woodstoves are so popular in New England. A millivolt gas log stove on a thermostat can also be a good alternative.

dathinab6• 5 months ago

Part of this isn't just relevant for "heavy snow" places but also for rear emergency situations you anyway should be prepared for.

This winter we had a power hick up _and then_ a multi day power outage.

You have a lot of batteries, flashlights, shelf stable food, warm clothes, and drinking water stored, right? Good.

I hadn't. Luckily the power outage was quite local so I could take a bus for ~30min to get to some shops, including ones with flashlights.

Also no propane heater or similar, you don't expect to need it where I live. I would have loved having had it even if just for a bit.

I also had a 1kWh battery.

But some annoying surprise:

- 1kWh is a bad size, to big (but still possible) to nice by food carry somewhere where you can recharge it but too small to use it for a lot of things

- Turns out even if you blanked is theoretically insulating enough to handle very cold temperatures, if it's cooled down, you bed is cooled down, and you yourself are cooled down you need quite a time to warm it up with body head. Doesn't matter that it can handle the temperature or having very warm clothes it will be a huge pain. Having some way (e.g. heat blanked run by battery) to slightly heat up your blanked _before_ you enter it makes an enormous difference when sleeping at ~10C.

- In general learn about winter camping tips they help you if you need to bridge 1-2 days in a very cold apartment. Also having a winter camping sleeping bag can be nice.

-----

The 3rd point is just general good advice, at least skim the manual it might have surprisingly important things in it. And sometimes random but useful tips.

---

build up and make the fallen snow denser and tougher

fun fact: this is how glaciers are formed, from non melting snow fall pilling up over years and by wight compressing the snow to ice

marpstar2• 5 months ago

The most recent thing I've learned after a lifetime in the Midwest US: There's nothing like the 'Snow Wonder Snow Scoop'[1] for moving snow manually.

Someone left theirs at my wife's previous home and she's kept it since. I don't get sore after shoveling anymore. I have a snow blower but only use it when there's more than 6" on the ground.

I've tried other "push sled" style scoops and none of them work this well (and weigh so little).

[1] https://snowscoop.com

j_bum• 5 months ago

The pictures show what looks like very powdery snow.

How does this fare with wet and icy snow?

marpstar2• 5 months ago

Honestly, even better. It's the wet snow that's especially heavy (and risky for your back), so not having to lift it is invaluable. Only when the snow is considerably taller than the scoop does it begun to show its weaknesses.

luigibosco2• 5 months ago

Who's afraid of the big bad wovel (snow wolf)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D3FzAk3fsA

waffletower2• 5 months ago

Frozen plumbing pipe lessons ought to be here.

wafflemaker• 5 months ago

While talking about Norwegian ways to keep warm in winter you can't forget their wool underwear (ullundertøy), which is not underwear (but is often made of wool).

It's a set of pants and a long sleeve, worn right on your underwear/body. It greatly improves your heat comfort in winter, which I quickly learned the first time out of town in cold with Norwegians. They take it as a given that everyone owns a set.

There's also a hi tech version called superundertøy, which is good at channeling sweat away from body in addition to keeping you warm.

Ullundertøy is very warm. I haven't put mine on yet this winter (only using regular long johns), as temperatures haven't fallen below -15*C yet (and it's been coldest winter so far this decade). But I'd wear it if going outside for longer and planning on staying stationary.

stronglikedan• 5 months ago

The lesson I learned is to never live in a snowy place, but they're great for visiting!

jimnotgym3• 5 months ago

If too many people read this, then what are FailArmy going to put in all their videos?

bmitch3020• 5 months ago

Two lessons for driving in snow/ice:

1. In a parking lot, clear behind the car, and just enough to get inside. Then back the car out of the space, clear the car off, clear the parking space out, put the car back in the parking space and clear everything you knocked off. If tried without pulling the car out of the space, you'd be trying not to ding up your neighbor's car, clearing in tight spaces under the car, and then doing it all again when you clear off the top of the car into that narrow gap.

2. Don't drive unless you absolutely need to. You may know what you're doing, but others almost certainly don't. But do make sure to clear out at least one car, just in case there's an emergency.

soared• 5 months ago

19 - why not just dump water into the tank and flush like normal? Dumping water into the bowl directly is just more complex than letting the existing lever do it.

beloch• 5 months ago

"Do NOT get wet and cold."

This is very true whether the source of the water is outside or inside your clothing.

Unfortunately, this warning is immediately preceded by the recommendation that you should use rain-gear in winter. A lot of rain gear is very lacking in breathability. If you go out and do something physical in raingear, you will likely wind up drenched in sweat. i.e. Wet. The moment you stop being physical, you will get cold. i.e. Cold and wet. This is a recipe for hypothermia.

helle253• 5 months ago

Do NOT get wet and cold.

One thing i keep saying over and over, and few believe me, unless they know from experience - is that winters in Chicago are actually significantly more miserable than Minneapolis, where I went to college.

Minneapolis winters are so cold that everything is dry as a bone, so the cold doesn't 'stick' the same way - Chicago winters sit mostly in the 20-40 range where it's both wet and cold (often raining at a balmy 34-38F), and it's much much more immiserating to be outside.

Reubachi2• 5 months ago

I am in a similar area IE; usual coldest is low 20s, often sits around 32-38f. But have oft worked outside in consistent cold snaps from negatives to 10f or so, also on boats/the docks.

working in dry extreme cold is infinitely worse than balmy 35f. One because in both scenarios moving snow/moisute out is required regardless of temps for working safety, and two because dexterity is gone at the lower temps/layering becomes inhibitive to work.

Ie; I'd rather work in a rain/snowcoat and be able to use my hands to get back inside quicker, than to work 8 hours outside in the "Clear/dry" extreme cold.

Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

Related Stories