There is very little to obsess about in the winter other than the management of snow. Snow and ice - and cold and wind and all that, but among the greatest obsessions is managing snow. More specifically, driveway snow.
A good friend of mine plays golf obsessively, and I find his stories pretty interesting even though I don't play the game. I think it's his enthusiasm. I have no such energy or personal irony or sense of timing or story-telling or whatever it is that makes a dull subject interesting. I go out and shovel my snow and clear and manage the snow banks and shape them and make their tops even and adjust them for cascading powder or sleet and move them back when they begin to encroach and cut them down a foot or two when they get too tall. That's about it.
My golf friend suggested that I find something about snowbanks that most people wouldn't know, but I think most of those things people also wouldn't care about. Here are a few, but I'm getting tired just writing about them:
- Granular snow or cold, dry snow flow like sand and cannot be stacked steeper than their angle of repose, which depends on crystal structure, free water and other stuff. So if you start your snowbank to close to the house or fence, it won't stack up too high at first.
- Piled snow is denser than fresh snow, and as it sits it compresses. It also sinters. After a few weeks you should be able to carve a vertical wall into a snowbank and it should hold. Often after only a week and infrequently, with wet snow, within a day. This means you can let your snowbanks encroach on your driveway intially, and then when they reach a few feet in height, cut them back with vertical sides. You pack more snow in that way.
- Frozen wet snow is impossible to cut with a shovel initially. After a month or two though you'll find it will have turned to 'sugar' and will cut with a metal spade or shovel. This will often happen to the bottom of the pile, even to dry powder which absorbs water vapor from the ground and turns to a sugary, sleet-like substance.
- Wind-crust or wet snow on top of dry snow forms unstable slabs that will crack and slide. Break them off manually so you don't have surprises later or while you're shoveling.
- Snowblowers and shovels naturally throw snow in a ballistic trajectory. This shapes your snowbanks like parabolas with a negative quadratic coefficient (upside down). If your banks get too tall and you cut them back into vertical walls, you won't be able to throw snow over them. Instead, cut them back in terraces like layered wedding cake. Each terrace will be recessed from the one below, naturally forming a parabolic arc and also will catch snow sliding from the terrace above until they eventually fill in.
- As long as you have your snowblower out, take the time to shave your banks and reblow the snow. A snowblower leaves around 10-20% of the snow short of the maximum distance it can throw, but that means 80-90% will go far. Cutting the banks and re-blowing redistributes most of the snow farther from the edge of the driveway.
- Don't pretend like re-blowing snow is bad. Even on a first cut. You can use the tool to move the snow downwind or up the driveway or whatever even if it means throwing it where you still haven't passed.
- When possible, move snow toward the road. The town plows will be cutting back roadside snowbanks from time to time and this means much less snow you'll have to manage.... of course, you should always put the snow on the right-hand side (facing the road from the driveway) so the plows move it down the road away from your driveway.
