Blizzard in Bville

You probably know about or experienced the big storm that dumped over a foot of snow along a 2000+ mile swath of the U.S. from Oklahoma to Chicago and New York. We thought we’d share a little about our experiences here in Bartlesville.

Last Saturday the high was over 70 degrees. We knew the weather was supposed to turn colder but we hadn’t really been paying attention to the news until Sunday evening when we realized that we were under a Winter Storm Warning starting on Monday and extending through Tuesday evening. The kids went to school and I went to work on Monday. I checked the weather a couple of times and then called Leslie to tell her that the Winter Storm Warning had been canceled… in favor of a Blizzard Warning. The kids never went to school again (at least for the rest of the week)!

There still wasn’t much to see when we went to bed on Monday night, but when we woke up on Tuesday morning it looked like this:

 

Needless to say, I got the day off of work. The kids and I decided to go outside and have some fun. I was excited to use our snowshoes again (they have been sitting in our garage for the last two and a half years feeling lonely and unloved).

 

After we came back in we kept watching the snow fall outside. Finally it stopped late in the afternoon. Official reports said we got 16-18 inches of snow. It looked pretty neat outside.

 

I started thinking that we could make a quinzee (a.k.a. snow cave made from a pile of snow rather than a snow drift). That is probably not something that we will have the opportunity to do often while living here. We took almost all of the snow from our driveway and some from our yard to make a huge pile of snow (probably 7 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter). We got some help from friends who live close by.

On Wednesday I went to work for half a day, but I had to walk out to another street to catch a ride with our friend, since our street was still full of deep snow. When I got home, Morgan and I started digging out the quinzee. When it was big enough for me to crawl inside I would fill up our sled with snow and pass it out to Morgan to dump it. After a couple hours we were done. And then we got our crazy idea… we would sleep in it!

After all the other kids were in bed, Morgan and I went out and crawled into our cave. We each used two mummy sleeping bags and took a bottle of hot water to keep our feet warm. We knew we had to be prepared because the forecast was for a low of -14 degrees! We covered the entrance with our trash can lid and then filled up the entrance tunnel with our snow clothes on top of the sled. It was so comfy and warm in our quinzee that I had to remove my hot water bottle and even poke my head out for a while to cool down. I was so proud of Morgan! He did great. He even wanted to sleep in it again the next night (we didn’t). Here are a couple pictures:

 

When we went inside the house in the morning, around 7:15, we checked weather.com to see what the temperature was. At 7:30 AM it was still -11 degrees outside, and for those who don’t believe it, here is a screen shot:



Leslie said I should email pictures to the local news station, so I did it and lo and behold they showed them on the weather segment of the 10 ‘o clock news on Thursday night. We recorded with our video camera to show to Morgan. Here it is (I didn't know that "Nate" was such a difficult name to pronounce correctly):



On Saturday we played outside in the snow again (it’s going to be around for a long time). Here are a few more pictures, including a collage (which you can click on for a larger version), of us in the snow cave. The ceiling is a little lower than it was the first night! Sadly, I was never able to convince Leslie to sleep in it.





Morgan and Emma also had fun collecting icicles and making a “city” in the snow. I think it looks a lot like the place that springs up out of the ice on Superman. Anyway, we hope that if you were also affected by the storm you have been able to have some fun, too!