When you've been to hell and back, purgatory doesn't look that bad.
Just ask the good folks of Cordova, Alaska, who got nuked by another snow bomb this week. On Wednesday, they were methodically digging out of what fell as four to five feet of light puffy snow -- the kind of powder unusual for Cordova. Rain subsequently reduced it to a foot or two of heavy, dense snow, and residents were looking on the bright side.
"It's not like last year when we were driving in tunnels,'' said Barb Webber from city hall near the heart of the isolated fishing community of 2,300 at the southern entrance to Prince William Sound, about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage.
Actually, "ditches'" would be a better description for what Cordova residents were driving through last year -- snow ditches considerably above the height of an Alaska pickup truck. With buildings collapsing, boats sinking in the harbor and avalanches thundering down the mountains around the city after 18 feet of snow fell in January of 2012, "CBS This Morning" declared the city a "snowy prison.''
Call it Snowpocalypse
The Alaska National Guard was called in to help the inmates escape. The snow became a national news event. ABC News proclaimed it "'Snowpocalypse 2012' For Small Alaska Town.'' Even locals, accustomed as they are to winters with huge volumes of snow, admitted Mother Nature's full-bore offensive of 2011-2012 was enough to give them pause. But after surviving that, what is four or five or 10 feet of the white stuff? You just get to work digging out.
"The town was pretty shut down for a day,'' Webber said. City public works crews worked 12 hours straight moving 160,000 cubic yards of snow, enough to fill a professional football stadium. And when they were done, everyone moved on. "It did dump,'' Webber said. "But this is Cordova's spring. It's white and light and spring.''
She said the main fallout from the latest dump may be people sneaking out of work to ski, because the amount of snow that fell in town paled compared to the volumes dumped on the Chugach Mountains above the community. Points North Heli-Adventures, which runs helicopter-ski operations out of Cordova in the spring, reported 130 inches fell at its tour camp in the mountains over the course of four days.
One-hundred-thirty inches is almost 11 feet, or about a foot more than the height of a regulation basketball hoop. If a National Basketball Association player were driving through the snow to score, you'd see his head and arm pop out with the ball to dunk, and then everything would disappear beneath the white.
Beware blacktail deer and moose
It is a lot of snow, but not unusual for Prince William Sound, where so much snow falls in some places that the only large land mammals that can survive are bears. They sleep the winter away beneath tens of feet of snow, and then emerge to take advantage of the lush vegetation, berries and salmon of summer. Any wandering Sitka blacktail deer or moose caught in the deep-snow zones when winter sets in simply dies.
The National Weather Service reported 552.3 inches of snow fell at Main Bay in the Sound over the course of the winter of 2011-2012. That's 43 1/2 feet, enough to completely bury a three-story tall building. And Main Bay snowfall, while huge, wasn't unique. More than 36 feet fell on notoriously snowy Valdez. And Cordova, for the entire winter, saw 27 feet.
It hasn't been nearly as bad this year, but there is still a lot of snow," Webber said. "All the cars are buried in snow, all the ones that were parked out overnight.''
But it will melt. It always does. The sun is returning to Alaska and bringing its warmth. The days are already almost 13 hours long in Southcentral Alaska. Within a month, the sun will be shining from 6 in the morning to 10 at night. The snow cannot win, but it is putting up a great last stand.
Cordova wasn't the only place bombed by the last snowstorm. Parts of Anchorage got 15 inches or more, and there was enough in Whittier to cause an avalanche that temporarily closed the tunnel that connects that northern Prince William Sound community to the state's road system. The avalanche debris has now been cleared, and the tunnel is open again.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com