33 inches of snow fell on Aspen Park, Colorado

On the shore of Lake Ontario in upstate NY, where I grew up, we had a specific word for that kind of condition.

We called it “spring.”

Of course, I’m just fuckin’ witcha, but the truth is that Oswego, NY, once got more than 100 inches of snow in one storm, the Blizzard of 1966, including 50 inches in one day, with winds gusting to 40-50 mph. If I remember correctly, we never lost our power (a miracle), but schools were closed for a week or more, and cars had to drive through canyons called roads. Oswego averages 113 inches per year, so it’s always bad, but that storm was unforgettable to those who lived through it.

10 thoughts on “33 inches of snow fell on Aspen Park, Colorado

  1. I live in a place where the murder tries to actively murder you five months out of the year.

    I think I prefer the extreme cold versus the Lake-Effect Snowfall you see in the Great Lakes area. We had a month stretch of almost -30 weather but the front yard never got more than a half metre of snow. Its cold but its a dry cold.

    1. I live in Wisconsin now, which is similar to (but not as dramatic as ) what you described. The extreme cold is easy to bear, and creates very little disturbance in life. The snow is minimal. 4-5 inches is a big storm, forty inches is a year rather than a weekend. I much prefer it to upstate NY.

      Snow creates so much inconvenience, so much work. I would be happy never to see it again, and perhaps I will soon realize that wish, because I have now sold both houses I had to deal with (my own in Wisconsin and my sister’s in Rochester, NY). I’m looking for a new place to drop anchor.

      1. I am sorry you will be leaving Wisconsin, where I also live, but I can understand wanting something different. Might I suggest Vivian, South Dakota? It holds the record for the world’s largest hailstone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian,_South_Dakota

        Golconda, Nevada would be even more of change for you. It is just off I-90 and within easy shopping distance of Winnemucca. Also, I can imagine no safer place to be during an earthquake. Vivian is also good in that regard.

        1. Earthquake in Vivian? Well, you won’t have to worry about tall buildings tumbling on you.

  2. I lived through that 100 inch Oswego storm. The 50 inch day may have been the official number, but it was probably about 70 inches where we lived. On Monday morning, I climbed out of a second story window and dropped down into a drift and shoveled my way out to a door so we could exit the house in case of a fire. We actually didn’t see a car on the road until Thursday after noon, only snowcats until then. No power loss and we had plenty of food and beer, thanks to my Dad. One good thing: my fiance happened to get stuck in the house with us.

    1. My experience in ’66 was very similar. We had an attached garage with a flat roof. The house was built in the 30s, so there was no entrance from the house to the attached garage, but we could enter the garage roof, which acted as a patio, from a second story bedroom. Dad and I dropped down from the garage roof to a place that wasn’t too deep, and just started digging.

      … and digging

      … and digging

      We basically had to dig from the side of the garage to the garage door with our hands and makeshift shovels. It was quite a relief to make it inside the garage – if only to get the shovels.

      And at that point we had not even begun the real work – like shoveling out and opening a house door in case of an emergency.

  3. Denverite reporting in. 28″ in south-central Denver (1-25 & Evans).

    Helluva storm. Not as bad as the blizzard of ’03, but still enough to make the top 10 recorded.

    Was funny as hell watching people eat crow who, 12 hours previous, had been calling for the resignation(!) of the forecasters at NWS that had predicted this size storm. It just came in one LARGE package rather than over 3 days.

  4. I was in Herkimer, NY, Exit 31 in 1966. I worked at a dairy and normally my job was scooping ice cream. As the blizzard hit, the owner “promoted” me to assistant milkman. The regular guy drove and I trudged back and forth. “We” completed the route every day for a week, even though many of the houses were seriously set back from the street, and no one had shoveled their walks/driveways. I don’t think snowblowers were invented yet.

    I don’t recall getting tired, maybe because I was 17.

    1. I got off at the Herkimer exit many times to go to Cooperstown, but never actually went into Herkimer to look around. For some reason I remember that as exit 30. I thought exit 31 was Utica – the Schulz and Dooley exit.

  5. A 100 inch snowstorm in Oswego in 1966? Phooey I say! I lived through a 3 inch storm in NYC in 2018. More importantly my mother lived through it.

    The Thursday before Thanksgiving, I had to take my mother for a cancer screening at Sloan Kettering in Manhattan. We traveled via Access A Ride, NYC’s para transit for the disabled. In our particular case that was just a taxi they sent rather than a vehicle designed for the disabled. But the only equipment she traveled with were a walker and a small O2 concentrator. She had the screening and while we were waiting for our ride home we were able to make sure the battery in the concentrator was fully charged. We also had two spares. That was all because Inogen, the company manufactured and sold the concentrator charged $300 for extra batteries ($500 for double size batteries). Our ride picked us up at 3 pm but had to drop another woman off first. It had started to snow. NYC would end up with a total of 3 inches, but hadn’t expected any snow. Highways ended up clogged with cars so plows and salt trucks couldn’t get to them. Our driver dropped the other woman off in the East Bronx and then started to bring us home. It should have taken 10 to 15 minutes. It took 8 hours because we couldn’t find a way across the Bronx River (called a river but in reality barely a stream). After 4+ hours of trying to get across our driver, who didn’t speak English, got someone on a speaker phone to tell us he wasn’t going to be able to get us home so we had to get out of the car. I told him he was working for a service that transports the disabled and there was no way in hell I was going to let him put my disabled mother out into the snow when no one could pick us up. Of course, by this time we had run through all the batteries for my mother’s O2. I thought about calling an ambulance for her, but there would have been no way for it to get to us with the roads filled with cars that weren’t moving. It was nearly midnight when we finally got far enough North of the City to cross over the Bronx River Parkway and get back South to home. The next morning my mother asked me to order 2 of the $500 double batteries.

    Three frickin inches of snow paralysed a city that is used to snow. It could have killed my mother, who fortunately came through it OK. But she passed the following September.

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