Snow removal

We seem to be desperately looking for snow, and when it falls we’re equally desperate to clear it. Lots of options are available to us in Park City. Obviously, you can ignore the snow, drive over it all winter long with your vehicle but soon you’ll get gigantic ruts and ice that will rock you through the end of March. Another solution is to pay someone who comes with a truck outfitted with a snowplow blade and cleans up after each snowfall. You can pay the service on flat rate basis, for the season (good if there are tons of snow), or per occurrence. That solution is not only expensive, but it will also break a few things around your house; I guess this comes with the territory. Then of course, you can always do it yourself, with a snow shovel or if you’re mechanically inclined, with a snowblower. We own both set of tools but since we pride ourselves on being “green”, we only use the blower when it’s really necessary.

Today was one of these days; as we got up this morning, we found at least 14” of fresh snow waiting for us. We fired up our Honda snowblower which started on the first pull, in perfect Japanese fashion, after nine month of hibernation. While I was operating it, Evelyne was doing the finishing work with her shovel. Between the driveway, pathway and backyard patio, the whole job took us close to one hour. Then we drove to Old Town and repeated the same operation on a building that we have there, but this time, it was all handwork and we had to move 18” of new snow off a pretty large area. When we returned home, we saw one of our neighbors, whose husband was out of town, and who was trying to clear her driveway with just a shovel. We took pity on her, restarted the snowblower, and proceeded to finish it off. But before I completed the job, the blower caught her daily newspaper that had been thrown into the deep snow and the machine came to a screeching, frightening halt. Bad news! I had that happened before with a thick Sunday paper and I had to have the machine brought back to the dealer. I ran home to fetch a large screwdriver in order to free the auger, but by the time I returned, Evelyne had done it by hand. This made for an even more memorable first giant snowfall day!