A Snowmageddon Dream Come True

Another New England winter has come & gone. Well… almost.

The Spirit of Winters Past

Here in New England, we take winters seriously. Not as seriously as we did 45+ years ago when I moved here,
but still pretty seriously.

There are a number of beautiful things to be seen in winter that you just don’t see in warmer places, or in colder but flat places like the US midwest. Here, for example, is what is sometimes called an icefall: artesian water normally forced out of mountain rocks by pressure, frozen in place in winter. This leads to ginormous icicles hanging from what looks like an ordinary rock face; see the person in the lower right for scale.

At the other end of the size scale, there are delicate little frost flowers. Here are some forming from the unlikely source of a storm drain in front of Château Weekend. As moist air from the storm drain is vented up, it hits the grate and collapses like faery magic on cold iron, leaving behind these very pretty little flower-like structures.

They only last a few hours, usually destroyed by sunlight, more moist air, or &endash; in this case &endash; being driven over by cars.

This last winter has been… interesting. The venerable Globe compares winter 2026 to the “Snowmageddon” of 2015 ^[1] (but does not make the comparison to the blockbuster Blizzard of 1978; too antique, I guess).

In a series of memorable consecutive blizzards in 2015, 8 feet of snow fell between 2015-Jan-24 and 2015-Feb-22. Here’s a dramatic picture from the venerable Globe, showing people walking around downtown in 2015. They’re not actually walking in chest-deep snow, but they are walking in chest-deep, narrow channels cut in the snow with snowblowers and shovels. If you were a kid, you probably couldn’t see out the sides. This went on for… an annoyingly long several weeks.

Then there’s the problem of how to dispose of snow. You can only shove it to the side of the road with a plow for so long, lest you leave the buildings and sidewalks entombed until spring. So some snow gets put on trucks and taken… somewhere.

It used to be dumped in the harbor, to melt. This turns out to be a terrible idea: snow scraped off streets is full of salt, asphalt, gravel, broken glass, and multiple other things that make it no fun for humans to touch and certainly nothing suitable for putting in harbor waters you’re trying to clean up. So, enter “snow farms”: usually municipally-owned vacant lots or even sacrificial parking lots where snow gets piled up. And by “piled up”, I mean really up.

There was one such snow farm next to my lab back in 2015. Here are some views of it:

• The first shows just a huge pile of snow and ice, with some yellow earth-moving equipment on top. That thing is big. To give you some idea of scale, this was taken out a 3rd story window, and the big earth moving machine is at about eye level.
• The second picture shows a much smaller earth mover on the ground, but the hill crowded with some very silly MIT students who wanted to climb the mountain that had been built in a parking lot. It’s silly because: it’s slippery, making falls likely; there can be voids underneath that collapse & swallow you; and it’s full of broken glass and bits of metal that will slice you up. I did see one extremely dangerous video of a person skiing on a similar snow farm, which is dangerous enough that cops intervened to prevent serious injury. (For once, I was on the cop side.)
• The third picture shows the snow mountain at what was probably its peak height. Note that we are looking out a 3rd story window, and we are looking up at the peak. That snow farm has built a mountain about 4 stories tall, and as big as a parking lot that spans maybe half a city block. And it was one of dozens such snow farms.

We had an office betting pool about when it would melt. As I recall, nobody one because nobody would be so extreme as to guess it melted in July. But, July it was. It left behind mounds of broken glass, asphalt, a couple shopping carts, and even a fire hydrant: all stuff that got scraped off by giant snowplows, operated none too carefully.

Sometimes Life Imitates Art

Looking at that snow farm back in 2015, I had a fantasy that when it finally melted, there would be a car under it. In that car would be a body, preserved by the cold… and that’s the start of a murder mystery to find out who killed whom 6 months ago.

Again the venerable Globe points out that sometimes life imitates art. ^[2]

As one of the snow farms in neighboring Somerville illustrates, sometimes you do find actual cars when the tons of snow above them melts. Needless to say, these cars are not in exactly good condition after all that.

Internet wags notwithstanding, it turns out that the city of Somerville actually knew all about this. The 6 cars involved were all junk vehicles, awaiting being towed for scrap in a city parking area. (And there’s another story about why the city had that parking area, involving eminent domain, resistance to building a Cop City, legal fights with the original owner leading to millions more having to be paid to seize it in eminent domain, and so on.) But the snow happened quickly, a snow farm was urgently needed, and there was no time to tow the cars, so… they were like those wooly mammoths frozen in Russian tundra.

No bodies in the cars so far, at least not as reported in the venerable Globe.

So that’s a relief. Sometimes life shouldn’t imitate art too carefully.

The Weekend Conclusion

Look, I love winter.

The dark, the cold, the snow… it’s all beautiful. Just look at these 2 pictures of the grounds here at Château Weekend. The first is a freakish snowstorm in early April this year, for which the snow accumulation an hour later was exactly zero. The second is a beautiful frost pattern seen on a metal roof and skylight, reminiscent of an arts & crafts floral rug design in the style of William Morris. This didn’t last either; again like faery magic it dissolved at the dawn sun.

With enough snow, you can make my winter daydream come true: underneath tons of snow, melting months later, a car appears. (Though, admittedly, with a pedestrian explanation. It had better be pedestrian, because nobody’s driving those cars ever again.)

The snow farms are kind of ugly after they’ve been there a few months, but amusing nonetheless.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

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Notes & References

1: K Mahan, “Has this winter been worse than the ‘Snowmageddon’ winter of 2015? Here’s what the data show.”, Boston Globe, 2026-Mar-02. ↩

2: C Fonseca, “That big snow pile in Somerville? The cars buried in it are emerging.”, Boston Globe, 2026-Apr-14. ↩