Ever wonder how monster snow drifts at Yellowstone National Park are dealt with? Wonder no more and feast your eyes.
Yellowstone is located mainly in Wyoming, but parts of the park spill into Montana and Idaho. Summers are beautiful, lush with countless types of plant and animal life, but winters are an entirely different story.
The park receives 50 to 200 inches of snow per year, heavier on the interior than at entrances, which makes road use unfeasible. Plows stop running the first Sunday of November through late April other than one road that’s kept open all year which runs from the north entrance at Mammoth to the northeastern entrance at Cooke City, according to Yellowstone National Park Lodges.
While plowing may be stopped, it doesn’t mean that no snow removal occurs within park limits, so how do you go about it? Snow banks can get unbelievably deep, sometimes 10 feet or more, so you can’t just attack it with a typical plastic shovel.
Turns out, they have a very unique and skillful way of handling the problem, as we can see in this video taken by a tourist who visited in January of 2019.
The Canyon General Store was covered in about 7 feet of snow and one tough worker was tasked with digging it out. Instead of just putting his head down and blindly attacking the mound, he figured out a genius way of moving it.
He cut out refrigerator sized chunks and used two shovels to drag the giant snow rectangle to the disposal area. Genius, just plain and simple.
Of course, it’s going to take a long time to clear all of that, but man is it satisfying to watch.
The simple pleasures of watching someone who’s great at their job…
