• Thursday-What'sUP April 6 - 04:59 am

With Old Man Winter's return to the North Country here in the U.P., it once again reminds us of how fortunate we are that our road crews know what they're doing when it comes to keeping the highways cleared. Lois Haglund captured one of the highwaymen in action, making our roads safe and passable. Even with ten or more inches of snow, it's not usually a problem to get the roads opened up and ready for the drive to work or wherever you may be heading. This fresh snowfall reminds us that without these guys to remove the accumulation, we wouldn't be going anywhere, so the next time you see a plow driver, pat him/her on the back and give them a big thank you!

Too bad it's April instead of December. Snow's not very welcome in April. But it is pretty.

The drifts are as tall as me outside our front door this morning. The bridge cam gives a good idea what it's like:

So it does Charlie. Guess we'll have to cancel our trip UP.

Kosk, Go anyway, that's just part of the adventure!

Hey Charlie, it doesn't look like the river is icebound though.

looks like some snow! I kept an eye on the Bridge cam yesterday, or i assume it was the bridge cam should have been renamed snow cam.

Hey, hey, Kosk, by the time you get this far west things will be cleared up. Make your trip.

When we talked to him last night, our MTU student reported a 6-ft drift in the driveway of his off-campus residence. That was just from this storm, as all previous snow had melted. He also reported actually seeing the windows in the upper floors of the Chem-Sci building "pulsing" from the high winds yesterday.

We have drifts, from just within a 24-hour period, higher than we had all winter. Yesterday was wild. A precip record was set in Marquette of 1.79 inches, as to 1.12 in 1974, and Phoenix, Keweenaw Co. reports heavy snow m18.0 inches in 24 hours. Guess I'll bring the skiis back up from the basement. :>)

According to WLUCTV6, Marquette got 15 inches as of some time yesterday:
http://www.wluctv6.com/Global/story.asp?S=6327026
That same report said that Houghton got 18 inches, but according to the Daily Mining Gazette, Houghton only got 8 inches yesterday. Also, MTU's web cams look a lot closer to 8 inches than 18 inches. I think that Greata's Phoenix report for Keweenaw County sounds like it could be right because, if my memory is correct, that is up on the ridge, somewhat near Mohawk?

I think that Marquette & Ishpeming might have gotten as much snow as anyone UP there, though.

Maybe Mary needs to leave her snow scoop by the door, & Greta needs to keep her skis upstairs, too, at least for awhile? LOL

Ok, Greta mentioned drifts and I just couldn't resist running outside to share the drift between my neighbor's house and ours here in Lake Linden...keep in mind the snow was COMPLETELY gone before this storm started on Tuesday afternoon.

I don't have an official measuring station and it's difficult to measure snow with the high winds that we've had the last couple of days but I would guess at 25 to 30 inches here in Mohawk.

I think we can all say that Mary learned her lesson with the snowscoop. This is all her fault. Lets hope this lets up soon for you guys.

That's an awesome snow drift, especially considering that it's between two houses close together, Mary. I would have figured that the closeness would have blocked some of the wind, but I would have figured wrong!

I wonder what the snow drifts are like out in more open areas?

(Whispering) Am I alowed to say it... fresh snow is beautiful no matter when it falls! Of course it's easy for me to say down here in NW Illinois with just a lot of rain last week. But then there's all the flooding with that.

I agree. That drift is beautiful!

I would have to jump in that big pile of snow.

Thanks guys! After consulting with our daughter and numerous
relatives in the UP, we decided not to go. The turn around time is
too short to spend so much time traveling. We've driven through
some pretty miserable weather, but we had an extra day or two on
the other side. Sigh.

I guess this belongs on What's Up, but the snow talk was related to
this picture.

I don't know where anybody measured 8 inches of snow in houghton, maybe 8 inches an hour because here in Hancock we got atleast 20 inches from this storm.

The eight inches of snow in Houghton was apparently measured yesterday morning, and here is the news story that it came from:
http://www.mininggazette.com/stories/articles.asp?articleID=6443

We got about 6 inches here below the bridge, but half of it at any one time is moving from one place to another very fast and low over the roads. Visibility is as bad as in that Twilight Zone episode where there was nothing but fog beyond the town's limits. I attended Holy Thursday Mass in Harbor Springs, and drove home on the back roads so I could go 20 without headlights in my eyes. Like driving through that heavy fog, but there was world beyond the city limits full of black trees and wind and stunned spring frogs.

That river is Portage Lake.

The precip record I mentioned was from the WeatherUnderground, and it actually said rain!?
Figure that one out. :)

I always thought that the Portage canal went under the bridge, am I wrong? My Mom used to call it that. She also used to talk about swimming across the canal in the summer. She grew up on East Street in Houghton. She was a kid during the teens and the twenties of the last century.

I always heard it called the portage canal too (actually just "the portage") but portage lake was always different. Mike, kids then had guts, My Grandma would roller skate down the hills on the streets in Houghton with those old strap on metal skates. She is still very active at 84.

Technically the body of water in this picture is a narrow arm of Portage Lake, the main body of which lies approximately 6 miles SE of the Portage Lake Lift Bridge, connecting to Lake Superior to the southeast via the Portage River, and to the northwest via the man-made Portage Canal.

Perhaps due to the narrow width of this arm of the lake, most local folks generally refer to the waterway between Houghton and Hancock (somewhat imprecisely) as the "Portage Canal".

I believe this Wikipedia entry is reasonably accurate: Keweenaw Waterway

The "Portage Canal" is technically only the portion at the north end of the waterway (see the picture in the above link) that had to be dredged and extended to what is now the "North Entry". Note that the Keweenaw Peninsula really was a peninsula, attached to the southern portion of Houghton County before that man made canal severed it from the mainland!

I was looking at the image on the Wikipedia link that FRNash/PHX,AZ posted above. Is the large bare area on the upper right side of the image the old Coast Guard Station?

If so, does anyone know what it was, perhaps a parking lot?