Snowiest winter on record!

So if you listen to me whine on Facebook, you'll know that while everyone else had a record-setting mild winter, here in Alaska it was snowing, snowing, and snowing some more. It snowed ALL winter long.

Some official stats: Snowiest winter on record since they started tracking in 1952; 133.6 inches for the winter (just over 11 feet) compared to an average 69.5 inches; over 250,000 TONS of snow plowed off the streets of Anchorage, which would go 1,200 feet into the air if placed on a football field surrounded by walls.

Luckily Anchorage is prepared for lots of snow, so the roads stayed nice and plowed all winter long (unfortunate, actually, when you work in an industry that gets a day off when the roads are horrible). The only really annoying thing was the huge snow berms outside our driveway and other entryways, which made it really hard to see when coming out onto the main road. You just had to sort of guess and go. Here are some pics. Please note these were taken in APRIL. You can click to enlarge to see the arrows and stuff better.

 This is the front end of our front yard, from the entrance to our driveway. The front fence, which you can barely see, is 4 ft. high. This is the snow berm that blocks the view of oncoming traffic when you're leaving the driveway. Luckily our street is not busy.

This is a picture of our front yard. You can tell how little of the front fence you can actually see. This is a half acre of front yard buried under 4 ft. of snow. I think the grass will be really green if the snow ever melts this summer.

One day I came to work and the parking lot was plowed. The little snowpile is on the left. It's HUGE. Similar piles in parking lots all over the city.

 Picnic tables in a "courtyard" at my school. No one's sitting on those this year.

 This is one you really need to enlarge. The circled area is one of the snow dump sites for the city's snowplows. You can see the pile, towering over the trees, from several miles away.

This is a picture of that same snow dump site from up close. It's mountainous.

So I hope I've justified my whining with these pics! And I hope the rest of you enjoyed your mild winter! Now I'm off to enjoy a well-deserved trip to San Diego this summer with my family to make up for surviving this crazy winter!