I was chatting with my dad recently and he was telling me about a big dump of snow that hit Edmonton that day, it was very early spring so it’s not horribly uncommon but still annoying. A couple of days later, we (in the Okanagan) were nailed by a surprise blanket of snow, way less than Edmonton got but a big drama for here in the spring, enough to keep everyone home for the day, at least until the roads were cleared. I was in the gym, working out and thinking about these nasty bouts of winter when a very dramatic memory from the B&B came drifting into my brain and remained there as all the nightmarish details returned to me…
I think it was around the middle of November; it wasn’t quite the winter-guest season loaded with snowmobile or heli-ski enthusiasts so I had no guests booked into the lodge this early in the winter. One of my oldest friends was en route between Edmonton and his place near Sun Peaks and had planned on staying the night, having a good dinner and drinking a bottle or two of the wine he was bringing me from my other friend’s liquor store in Jasper. It was early morning and warm for the time of year but we were expecting a big snowfall (30cm/1 foot or so) followed by dropping temps – nothing out of the usual for that mountain setting.
By noon over 30cm (a foot) of snow had fallen and there were NO signs of it relenting… it was already more snow than had been predicted for the whole day. I had tried to call a plow guy but he was booked solid. I tried another guy who was trying to get his rig working and promised to come out as soon as he could because he understood that I was trapped on my property by myself and had no way to get out if I had to. By 1pm the snow was still pounding down and my friend called from Jasper to say that he was on his way through but by the time he got to my driveway, more than an hour later, he realized he couldn’t get into my property and just pulled over to leave the case of wine by the side of the road and I would have to wade out to get it. He called to let me know and that he was going to just keep going and try to get away from the storm and the highway closures which were in place everywhere but weren’t going to stop him from getting the hell out of the area. Despite the obvious danger I totally understood his decision and wished I could get in my truck and get the hell out of the area too.
I put on a snowmobile suit and took a small toboggan with me and started making my way through the new, heavy, wet snow to rescue my case of wine. The snow was up to my thighs by now (might be a good time to mention that I’m really tall, almost 6 feet so the snowfall was now shockingly huge) and like walking through quicksand, it was an exhausting trek to the end of my driveway, which was a good 100m long. I threw the case of much deserved and needed wine onto the toboggan and started making my way back down the driveway to my lodge. The round trip to fetch the wine on the highway was around 45 minutes… an awful amount of time when you think about doing nothing but wading through thigh-high wet snow, but SO worth it when you think about going into a disaster situation with no booze.
Who knew things could get worse, but in true “Murphey’s Law” form, they did. The snow stopped falling at almost exactly 1 metre (34 inches)! Then the temperature started dropping, and it dropped and dropped. It went from just barely freezing enough to be snow and not rain, to -30C (which is cold enough for anyone to wish they were anywhere else) within about 8 hours; fast and furious.
And then, as if this situation weren’t challenging enough, the power went out. NOT GOOD! All I had was a wood-burning furnace with electric forced-air fan and electric back-up heat… I remember thinking, “ok, this is going to suck hard fast”, and it didn’t disappoint. Without electricity there are no fans to run the wood heat through the house so it just goes straight up the chimney and the radiant energy is pretty limited. Within 2 hours you could see your breath in my wing so I moved to the great room, lit candles and bundled up on the big leather couch with a ton of blankets and my cell phone (literally my lifeline at that point) nearby which was down to about 70% battery. This was going to be a shitty way to perish; slowly freezing to death on a completely isolated property that still had no access through the snow. I remember being really scared as the sun started to go down and it quickly got very dark. The plow guy who was trying to get his rig running kept checking in with me to see if I was ok; other than him I was pretty much cut off from the rest of the world.
Finally, after 2 hours of shivering in almost total darkness, the power came on. The huge lodge was now cold, about 10c (about 50f) and it was going to be a long road to get the heat up fighting the super freezing exterior temperatures. As it turned out, it took all night to get up to a barely-acceptable interior temperature as I had to feed the wood furnace every 2 hours with the electric backup doing its hardest work in tandem.
By morning I was exhausted by not only the stress of the happenings but also from having no sleep during the night. By mid-day the house was finally warm enough to take off my outer down snowsuit layer and shortly thereafter I heard the familiar and SUPER welcome racket of the giant snow plow coming to dig me out. The whole drama lasted just over 24 of the longest hours I spent while I owned that place. Now, thinking about it, I just can’t believe how scary that was, how brutal it was to go through it completely alone but also how glad I was that I didn’t have any guests there during that horrible night. Remembering some of them, I think they would have blamed me for the circumstances; some of them are the fun folks you can read about in my book, haha!
Thank you, as always, for stopping by my blog!
s.