Frozen Slush

This past few days of weather has snuck up on me. About two or three days ago, the temps were in the 30s. We received about four inches of snow overnight. The next day, it warmed up even more and rained for about twelve hours. Now, if you’ve ever experienced freshly fallen snow combined with freshly fallen rain, you know you get a whole heck of a lot of slush. You probably also know that it’s really not worth it to get out there and attempt to remove the snow/rain from the sidewalk and driveway while it’s still precipitating because the hole you empty is going to fill right back up again.

With this wisdom in mind, I waited. I didn’t do any slush removal from either the front sidewalk or the driveway during the time the rain was falling. I looked at the weather forecast and told myself that since the temperature was still rising from the morning and would actually reach about 40 degrees overnight, I had about an hour the next morning to get everything cleared away. After that, the cold weather would return and I’d be in real trouble it I didn’t get what I needed to get done, done.

Well, that plan didn’t work out very well. Apparently, our little valley here is just a few degrees lower than the rest of the area and when I woke up extra early to clear the driveway, I found it frozen solid. So now, this is what I’m looking at.

I can’t do a thing with it. It’s so hard that I could probably chip it away with a hammer, but I don’t think I’ll do that. I don’t feel all that terrible though because the road out there is about two inches of pure ice. You can see straight through it to the dirt below. It’s crazy. I suppose this is what happens when it rains in the winter and then the temperatures fall to near zero. You just suffer with this extremely crunchy and difficult to walk on ice-snow. That’s all there is to it.

In a few days, we’re supposed to rise all the way back up to 44 degrees. I’m going to have to get out there and try to do something. If I can’t shovel it, I’m going to start the truck up and drive back and forth over it in an attempt to flatten things out a bit. Anything would be better than these ruts.