the outer edge of Rich's Snowacane hits here
This has been a very weird storm. Before it got here, the forecasters said it would buzz through in one day with less than an inch of snow that wouldn't stick except on grass. Every following forecast was worse and worse because the storm got worse and worse. They were not forecasting; they were just trying to keep up with what was happening, which they obviously did not have a clue how to figure it out. The storm stalled in its easterly movement, sat on South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas and just expanded everywhere. That one-day storm has lasted four days and gawd only knows if it will actually move on eastward by tomorrow night. Obviously, as Crom notes above, it has stretched itself clear out to Kentucky.
I did not bother to use the bobcat again today. On the struggle to get to the barn this morning, it was obvious that the wind filled in everything that was dug out yesterday. Maybe with a micrometer, I might have found the places where the bobcat moved snow out of, but for practical purposes, there were NO PATHS to the barns or anywhere else. Not only new snow, but a high and constant wind was relocating snow from one place to another (drifts). Evening chores tonight, I dug out a small drift across the north porch (about a foot deep) and by the time we got back from the barns (appx.45 minutes), not only could we not find our own footprints, but that little drift was back as if I had never touched it.
Total snowfall? A really funny thing... the TV weather reported that
Mud Butte, SD had the heaviest snowfall of this storm and it amounted to 18 inches. I laughed my ass off at their made up lie. Mud Butte is 14 miles west of here. It is an intersection of two gravel roads with US Hwy 212. It has 2 cell phone towers and 2 abandoned buildings (doesn't even qualify as a ghost town like Maurine, where we live, population 2, me and Lannie) and
no one lives there. There is no reporting weather station in Mud Butte and no living human there to measure snowfall or report it. These TV assholes picked a remote place to tell a false story about while knowing full well that the rest of the country would not know a thing about it. Now this particular storm has been snowing non-stop since Tuesday, which makes it the longest duration snowfall of this year. My guesstimate of the total snowfall we have received (trying to accommodate the movement due to wind (drifting)), is that we have received approximately 30" in three days. It is still snowing and the forecast says it won't stop until tomorrow night. So, folks, if that is true, and the snowfall rate is the same as it is right now, by sunset Friday,
we will have gotten a full three feet (with some drifts up to 6-7 feet and no longer any bare patches). Now why do you suppose the TV people are trying to make it sound like less and hide the truth?
As I said, it was snowing... it has been snowing non-stop all day, but not too heavily, thank dawg, so my guess is that we only got an additional 4-5 inches today. It still has not stopped, so I have no idea how much more we will have come morning.
