So you can imagine our dismay when, a few days before Christmas, we were hit by an Alberta Clipper. It blew all day and all night and the 40 mile-per-hour winds, hardened the snow to near concrete consistency. It left the roads blocked with four-foot-deep drifts. With today’s modern snow moving equipment, having a blocked farm road simply means the inconvenience of a couple of hours work with your tractor-mounted snow blower. In those days,however, the term ‘snow blower’ was more closely associated with the Alberta Clipper than it was with a snow-handling device. The most common snow handling device on farms then was a number 14 or 16 aluminum shovel that did double duty as a grain handler during harvest. During the harsh winters of the mid-40s, before snow blowers were common, it often meant waiting days, sometimes even weeks, for the township V-plow to bull through and open up the road. If one was unlucky enough to live on a lightly-traveled side road, the wait was always longer since you were low on the priority list and were the last to get plowed out. The township V-plow couldn’t break through the drifts. This meant that we would have to wait our turn for the one county rotary plow to come blow us
So you can imagine our dismay when, a few days before Christmas, we were hit by an Alberta Clipper. It blew all day and all night and the 40 mile-per-hour winds, hardened the snow to near concrete consistency. It left the roads blocked with four-foot-deep drifts. With today’s modern snow moving equipment, having a blocked farm road simply means the inconvenience of a couple of hours work with your tractor-mounted snow blower. In those days,however, the term ‘snow blower’ was more closely associated with the Alberta Clipper than it was with a snow-handling device. The most common snow handling device on farms then was a number 14 or 16 aluminum shovel that did double duty as a grain handler during harvest. During the harsh winters of the mid-40s, before snow blowers were common, it often meant waiting days, sometimes even weeks, for the township V-plow to bull through and open up the road. If one was unlucky enough to live on a lightly-traveled side road, the wait was always longer since you were low on the priority list and were the last to get plowed out. The township V-plow couldn’t break through the drifts. This meant that we would have to wait our turn for the one county rotary plow to come blow us