Having lived in the Pacific Northwest my entire life, I have limited experience with snow. I would describe a snow storm as something rare, fun, and fleeting. If you drove into town it might all have melted when you got back, and everything would be green again like it never happened. The snow storm that hit us in February was definitely not like that.
On Sunday, February 24, we woke up to a light dusting of snow. After being teased with snow forecasts that ended up being a whole lot of nothing this winter, actual snow was a welcome sight. We had just finished up most of our pruning and prepping garden beds for spring, so there wasn’t much pressing on the homesteading agenda. We went about our morning excited for the snow day, never imagining it would last beyond the afternoon. The snow continued to come down without letting up, and we noticed some really large flakes, but still, snow had never posed a problem for us before, so we kept on enjoying our snow day.
I decided it was the perfect day to chill by the wood stove with a snow day mimosa, and enjoy being cozy.
My son decided to make a rare appearance outside, away from his computer, to build an epic snowman.
It still just kept on snowing, and by the afternoon our snowman had really big hair. This was the most positive outcome of all that snow. The hair was really fabulous. After that things took a turn and started getting dicey. With all of that wet, heavy snow accumulating, we started hearing loud cracks and crashes of large trees and limbs breaking and falling. We are always aware that trees can pose a danger in a wind storm, and we make sure to keep our trees trimmed and clear of our house and outbuildings. We even had a couple of sketchy looking maples taken down above the garage in the fall, so we felt on top of our tree situation and still weren’t particularly concerned. As the snow kept falling, however, the crashes became louder and more frequent and we started to wonder about the 7 acres of timber on the hill above our house. I started peeking my head outside to look whenever we heard a crash. The power went out at one point in the middle of the day, and we thought we were in the clear when it was restored a couple hours later, but the snowpocalypse had other plans. That evening, it went out for good, and thus began our 7 day power outage. Our neighbor packed it up and went into town after we heard a few big crashes from their direction, and traffic eventually stopped out on the highway due to all the downed trees. When the neighbors are leaving and the highway is empty, things start to feel spooky. We spent most of the night laying awake listening to the cracks, booms and crashes echoing all over the valley in the darkness.
One of the crashes in the middle of the night sounded very loud and very close, and in the morning we woke up to find an uprooted 100 foot Douglas Fir where half of our shed and old goat barn used to be. The snow was still coming down and the crashes of falling trees continued all throughout the morning.
At one point we heard another loud crash and saw branches falling outside our window from a tree that had fallen on our garage roof. We had just had the garage re-roofed, so although we were glad the tree didn’t fall on the house, it was a less than ideal situation.
After 24 hours of snow falling and trees crashing, it finally stopped snowing by mid-day on Monday and we were able to go out and assess the damage. The shed that was crushed had all of our building materials for projects stored in it, and much of that was damaged and destroyed. In addition to the trees falling on the garage and sheds, another tree took out our recycling lean-to, our fence was crushed by limbs, and a lot of plants sustained damage. It took over a week for all the snow to melt to even be able to see everything. I even found a small pile of snow under some limbs behind the garage last week. Over a month later!
The snow storm may have been over at this point, but the aftermath was just beginning. We may be modern homesteaders, but preppers and survivalists we are not, so we were nowhere near as ready for an event like this as I wish I could say we were. I do have to say that my love of wood stoves served us well. Our Jotul combined with Corey’s firewood stockpiling saved the day. We stayed warm the entire week. Without power to the well, we ran out of our few gallon jugs of water in a day, but were helped by a neighbor giving us a larger jug to get us through while we got our snow melting system figured out. We were able to use the gas range in the kitchen for cooking, and moved all of our food into coolers outside to keep it from going bad. We got a generator hooked up to the freezer with all our berries and meat in it and didn’t lose any food. The wifi was down along with the power, and many people’s cel service in the area, but I still had a signal with my carrier and was able to work from my phone all week. Right before the power came back on, we finally figured out our local hot springs lodge had a generator and hot showers, and that was by far the best soak and shower I’ve ever had.
All in all, we survived and realized the ways in which we need to be more prepared. I learned a few things about dealing with insurance and mortgage companies, and realized we are fortunate to know some contractors who care about us and will show up when our homestead needs help. We’re still in the process of rebuilding and have a ways to go, but things are starting to get back to normal around here. Our neighbors, the utility companies, the highway crews, and we ourselves are still cleaning up the mess. Much of our typical work around the homestead involves maintenance, and progress on new projects and improvements. Nobody wants to rebuild something they’ve already built, or spend a bunch of time cleaning something up, but sometimes that’s what needs to be done. Once we get back to square one, we will definitely be doing some things before next winter, like getting our generator set up to run the well pump and a few things in the house the next time the power goes out. I’ve heard this was a once-in-a-lifetime storm, and I’m hoping that’s true, but we’re going to make sure we’re prepared if it’s not.
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