Real men use yellow machinery

When the snow load gets too heavy you have to shovel the roof.

In the post below about the media frenzy of an approaching winter storm, I made a little fun of an Alaska newspaper that thought it was vital to feature a story essentially telling Alaskans how to shovel snow.

Instead of that ridiculous story, the paper could have gone into what Alaskans use and how they use what they have to move snow.

Now that's snowblower.  Four hundred fifty four cubic inches of 
Chevrolet power will move a lot of snow. 

Mind you this comes from a person who lived for almost 20 years in the U.S. city that traditionally reports the highest winter snowfall in North America.  One year while I was there, Valdez, Alaska, received 47 feet of snow.  My dog walked across the snow berm between houses and curled up on the neighbor's roof next to the chimney for the warmth.  A friend of mine kept a BB gun close to his front door because with the snow halfway up his picture window, the neighbor's dog kept coming over and lifting his leg on it.

Just 20 miles away is a mountain pass that one year received the deepest snowfall ever recorded, more than 900 inches in one winter.

This snowfall is caused by a unique geography where the high massif of the Chugach Mountains rises immediately from the ocean shoreline.  Warm, moist air moving north from the Gulf of Alaska hits those mountains and stalls.  The moisture cools rapidly and releases the huge snowfalls in winter.  Those huge snowfalls have also formed a landscape littered with glaciers.

Now, given snowfalls as deep as 4 feet in 24 hours, the standard snow shovel is a fairly useless tool.  In the video above workers are using a Valdez snow scoop.  Those are made by a local sheet metal shop and cost upwards of $100.  But, they handle huge amounts of snow.  Some places with flat roofs even leave a snowblower up there all winter. 

How do they prepare?  For one thing, new houses have to be built with roofs able to handle a snow load of 120 pounds per square foot.  When subdivisions are laid out they have to leave a certain amount of land vacant for storing snow from street plowing in winter. When you build a house, you put doors and first-floor windows on the gable sides.  If you put them under the eaves you have a world of trouble when snow slides off the roof. When I built my house, I placed it on the lot as close to the street as zoning would allow.  What this did is leave me the shortest possible driveway to shovel, only about 10 feet longer than a pickup truck. And, speaking of those, you won't see many pickup trucks with snowplows on them because they just aren't strong enough to handle a big snow.  Even the folks who plow driveways, use those big Caterpillar front-end loaders.  Road graders and front-end loaders are used for the main roads as well.  

Yellow machinery!  If you don't know what that is, the next time you pass some road construction or excavation work going on,  look at the equipment.  And awful lot of it will be painted the ubiquitous yellow of the Caterpillar trademark for its heavy machinery.  And that earth moving machinery can also move snow.  Just to be fair in mentioning yellow machinery, I shouldn't leave out DeWalt power tools, another reliable Alaska favorite, but as far as I know it doesn't move snow.  Last summer though, I did observe a guy using a DeWalt sawzall to dig a trench.

As for personal snow removal, besides the Valdez snow scoops, snowblowers work, but you have to buy the big ones, the expensive ones, because the little ones just won't do the job.  The only alternative is to have half a dozen children, so you have a ready and replaceable supply of shovelers.  Incidentally I know the woman who made the video and she raised three husky sons, but probably won't admit she did it just for the snow shoveling.

Which brings us to the photograph.  Now, there is a man's snow blower.  Tim the Tool Man would be envious.  And, of course, whether on purpose or not, it is painted yellow.  According to the fellow who made it, it is powered by a 454-cubic-inch Chevrolet engine.  The cooling fan blows from front to back,  pushing engine air onto the driver for some warmth.  Cooling liquid flows through the handle bar for heating the handler's hands.  It is loud enough for neighbors to complain and demands use of ear protection.  It also will throw snow into next month.  It was not built by an Alaskan, but I would bet someone out there somewhere has built something like it.

And, what it does is bring heavy-duty, yellow, snow-removal equipment to a personal level.  The unique ways people find to move snow would have been a much more valuable news story for sure. More power! Always, more power!