Anchorage: Winter of 2011-2012

While the rest of the U.S. was complaining of a lack of winter, we were having an exceptional one in Alaska this year. Our January in Anchorage was the third coldest on record, and on April 6th 2012 we broke our record for total snowfall.  This was the best news ever, because it means that i don't have to listen to old timers anymore complain about how bad winters were back in the old days. Shut up, old man!

As of April 6th 2012, the seasonal total for the city was 134.5 inches - breaking the record of 132.6 inches, set in 1954-1955. That's nothing though, compared to other Alaskan cities like Cordova and Valdez.

Moose have had a very hard time this winter, and you could often see them out your window eating  your bushes and trees, like this calf.

Anyway, i'm glad that's over, since i mostly work outside, although we could still get more snow into May. I thought i'd put some pictures up, mostly taken with my phone around town, of what it looked like around here this winter.

Here's a picture of two cars (the humps behind the trees). I would have walked over one i hadn't seen a hole with a bit of metal showing at the last moment. If you had buried cars, you may have moose dents in the roof when the melt out.

This one is a Mercedes.

Hyundai.

This is what it looked like at any given time for what seemed like a month straight.

A dug out Subaru, for some reason it looks like a miniature.

People always want to know what it's like in the dark during an Alaskan winter. This (above) is what it's like at midnight. As long as it's cloudy at night and there's snow on the ground things in the city are very bright. You can read a non-digital newspaper if you want.

The hand rails of footbridges in city parks were down at your feet as you crossed them.

In addition to buried cars, and grills, and furniture, were buried fences. There a chain link fence buried in the snow over there in the sun. Chain link fences in residential areas are slightly unusual in Anchorage, but quite annoying when you are trudging through someones yard up to your waist and you suddenly walk into a buried fence.

Here's someone's front yard. They shoveled out a spot for their van.

Several roofs collapsed from the weight, like at this church.

Inside Schlotzky's. Sitting at the table the snow was over your head, piled up against the windows. The sign was nearly buried from the pile in the parking lot.

 


In some residential areas every corner was a blind turn.

If you lived in a neighborhood lucky enough to have plowed sidewalks you got used to walking down corridors of snow.

A funny situation that happens when the sidewalks are plowed and then the street get's superplowed, leaving short thin walls of packed snow.

The Anchorage municipality had a hard time keeping up with all the snowfall this winter. What generally happens is they try to do the main roads first, then residential zones. Normally they would do all the residential areas over a period of 3 to 4 days. We kept getting so much snow this winter that they had to stick to keeping the main roads open and some neighborhoods didn't get plowed for weeks at a time.

Even when they plow they usually just pile up on the sides of the street. The plows can only pile it up about three or four feet, so what happens as they keep coming by is that the street gets narrower. Eventually many streets narrow down to being only one lane, and larger trucks can have a difficult time navigating. At that point they come down for a big cleaning.

When the streets are too narrow they send out the heavy equipment. What is basically a big snowblower eats up the snow burms on the side of the street and blows them into a never ending line of dumptrucks.

As one truck fills up the snowblower pauses and another truck pulls up. Usually they do this at inconvenient times like 7am or midnight when you really don't feel like running out to your car to move it quickly. For the superplow job they usually put fliers all down the street to warn you a day ahead of time.

When the snow is removed from the streets it has to go dump it somewhere. They can't throw it in the ocean because of pollutants they put on the roads, so instead they have these snowdumps all over town where it's placed in big piles that melt all summer. We had so much snow this winter that the city ran out of places to put it.

A seasonal mountain range pops up all over town. I christen this one Mt. Michael Henry, after an obscure politician who never visited Alaska.

The IBEW likes erecting as many obstructions in town as possible. These obstructions are all brand new. Getting back to the snow though, this high plateau looked a lot like the location of the moon landing. I don't know how they made it so smooth.

Once spring arrives the melting begins. I call early spring icicle season. The picture above illustrates a problem known as ice-damns. You can see a layer of ice under the snow on the roof. In spring (or the dead of winter if you have bad insulation, as i think these people do) the water melts for a few hours and then freezes again before it gets off the roof, or because the gutters are clogged. Over a period of weeks it forms this thick layer of ice than can back up under roof tiles, causing roof damage.

Here's a crappy apartment building with a ton of icicles. You can find some building with icicles that reach all the way the the ground. Once they get this big you should definitely worry if you walk under them.

Here's an ice damn that has suddenly broken off of the roof and landed on the path to someone's front door. Notice how thick the foreground ice is.

Here's a side view. This weighs over a hundred pounds and probably fell quite suddenly. You really could be killed if you were unlucky enough.

I have no idea how much snow is up in the mountains, but i'm kind of worried about how long it's going to take to melt. I may have to go do my mountain hiking somewhere else this summer.