Drowning in Snow

I’ve lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota all of my life so I’ve seen quite a few blizzards. Unlike normal snow storms, blizzards “combine strong winds with falling or blowing snow to cause the potential of low visibility, deep snowdrifts, and extreme wind chill” (Coleman and Schwartz, 1). These particularly intense snow storms occur quite often during Minnesota’s famously harsh winters. Since the snow here sometimes doesn’t melt until around May, I wasn’t super concerned when I woke up on a crisp April morning with the news that it was going to snow. 

On that particular day back in 2018, I had a six hour lifeguarding shift at an indoor pool. Because I didn’t think the snow would be all that serious, I decided that I didn’t need to bring pants to wear over my uniform shorts. “It’ll be fine,” I thought to myself. “I’m just gonna run back to my mom’s car immediately after the shift. I won’t have a chance to get cold!” Oh, how wrong I was… 

Around 3:00 in the afternoon, an hour into my shift, the snow was starting to pick up. There was a birthday party that afternoon, and I remember being very confused as to why a large group of children wanted to use the pool when it was snowing heavily outside. Towards the end of my shift, around 7:00, the snow was really starting to look scary. When I looked out of the pool’s large windows, I could hardly differentiate the road from the sidewalk. Everything was covered in a sheet of white. I tried to stay calm, reminding myself that I only had an hour left and I would be fine. That’s when the head lifeguard got a call from our boss saying that he couldn’t make it to the closing shift and we would have to close early. 

As I put on my boots and jacket, still wearing my shorts, I got a call from my mom saying that she was stuck near the entrance to the highway and wouldn’t be able to pick me up. This meant I would have to walk fifteen minutes to meet her. I put my phone in my bag, said goodbye to my coworkers, and stepped outside only to be greeted with something along the lines of this: 

An image of the April 15th blizzard in the Twin Cities. Taken from MPR News. 

I couldn’t see anything, the snow was up to my knees, and I was wearing shorts. Being the determined 16 year old that I was, I trudged through the snow, nearly getting hit by a car that drove directly over the sidewalk in front of me. Around fifteen minutes later, I arrived at my mom’s car and promptly burst into tears. 

According to CBS Minnesota, this April blizzard had a total of 14.9 inches of snow. It even set a record in the Twin Cities, beating the 13.6 inches of snow in a 1983 blizzard. 

A map of the snowfall in the greater Minnesota area. Taken from weather.gov. 

Though Minneapolis was certainly one of the luckier areas in terms of snowfall, I’ll never forget the very uncomfortable feeling of walking through 14 inches of snow in shorts. 

Works Cited:

Coleman, J. S. M., and R. M. Schwartz, 2017: An Updated Blizzard Climatology of the Contiguous United States (1959–2014): An Examination of Spatiotemporal Trends. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 56, 173–187, https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-15-0350.1.

Minnesota, C. (2018, April 16). This Was The Biggest April Snowstorm The Twin Cities Has Ever Seen. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2018/04/16/twin-cities-snow-record/