Buried!!!!

I have to admit, I am overwhelmed!!! I can't keep up with the snow. We are buried. We have had 2.5 meters since Monday, 60cm overnight last night, 95cm in the last 24hrs and our snow base jumped to 480cm; That means that we are already half way to reaching the annual snowfall and the hill has only been open 21 days.

The snow today is heavy, wet and you sink waist deep, if not deeper, when you are trying to swim through it. There are massive cornices hanging over doorways and walkways dangerously that need to be brought down. Sadly as soon as they avalanche the snow gets into packed heavy piles that then need to be shoveled away.
I am hesitant to leave the house through the door because the "serac" off the roof is extremely unstable and slowly dropping mounds of snow down on to the doorway. The door way itself is under a balcony which, instead of protecting the area, creates a really bad trap if the serac was to slide fully when someone was standing there. Unfortunately, our alternative exit (a trap door into the Elkhorn breeze way), is practically useless until I can manage to dig out the Elkhorn Entrance way. I have already spent 2 hours shoveling this morning and I easily have another 2 hours to go on that alone.

This was the dig-out fun on Wednesday morning. Got all the vehicles out, had the cat clear the parking lot completely (down to the gravel) and the new guest showed up that afternoon.

We warned them that we WOULD be digging out cars and that they needed to park in tight rows 2 or 3 cars deep so that we could do as little digging to get as many vehicles out... they told me today they they didn't actually believe us...

Then, it snowed and snowed and snowed...

They believe us now!
The arrows point to the guest vehicles in our parking lot!
I am standing on the snow pile beside the front door of the Golden Hinde and you can faintly see the pathway leading to the road.

One of the guest dug to the back of the his vehicle. You can see that the drift is much taller then the car itself.

From on the pathway, looking back towards the chalet. A bit of window and car exposed. You can see the path is sitting at just over door handle height on the buried car and when your one the path the snow around you is still waist deep



This is the "serac" on the Elkhorn roof that is threatening to come down and bury our doorway! This photo is taken standing on the snow bank, level with the second floor balcony.


Here, you can see the same balcony and that rabbit hole down underneath it is the way to our entrance way. Needless to say, the guest are letting me go through there suite to get outside.

Stop Sign
I remember having a conversation with my Dad about how funny we thought it was that all the signs were up so high on posts... well, they are not up high enough.

The road is progressively getting narrower and the banks are getting deeper.

The camera was pretty foggy at this point (its super wet snow), however if you really look carefully you can see that the height clearance on this parking lot door says 7.5'.

This ended up taking me 3.5 hours to dig out! The snow had filled in the stairway completely and was about 1.5m deep on the top stair. The bank is too high (about 2.5 -3m) for me to throw the snow up and over it, so I actually had to haul the snow to behind where this was taken from. To keep that bank small enough I was actually climbing up on top of the bank and shoveling it level.