Snow days of yore

Someone posted this online, I do not know who took the photo. This is Kitimat, British Columbia in the winter of 1972. At that time I lived in Terrace which is less than seventy kilometres north by highway. Conditions there were close to the same.

I was in Grade Three when the snow started falling one winter Friday night in Terrace. It snowed nonstop Friday, Saturday, and ended late on Sunday. I remember my father clearing the snow a few times before he gave up. It was not a blizzard, just a gentle snowfall that never seemed to end.

Monday morning everyone woke up to find the town paralyzed by the snowfall. I remember it took the snow equipment a few days to get to our street. At that time we lived on Soucie Avenue (you could look it up if so inclined, I do not remember the house number). I usually walked to E.T. Kenny School. Not that day. It was awesome if you were a kid having that much snow. We had some great snow forts.

At that time my father worked as a heavy duty mechanic at a heavy equipment dealer. The branch manager at the time lived not that far away. On that Monday morning he got up, and seeing as it was impossible to drive to work, took it upon himself to walk there. It took him about two hours in the heavy wet snow. Once he got there he found the place empty and started calling staff to ask why they were not at work. He got a few choice replies.

The whole town eventually got dug out and life got back to normal. We moved from Terrace to Cassiar which was a much smaller place and routinely got about twenty feet of snow every winter.