National Post (National Edition)
A mountain out of a snow hill
Edmonton snowdrift is over 200-feet high
Anne Spiller is older than “sin,” she tells me. And being older than sin and being in Edmonton means that she has seen a lot of winters, and the one she is currently experiencing, that keeps walloping the Prairie capital with one snow dump after the next is, she assures me, nothing special.
“I don’t get why people are making such a fuss over it,” Ms. Spiller says. “We used to make snow caves when I was a little girl and the snowdrifts were as high as the houses.
“This winter hasn’t been much to me. I actually find it to be rather mild.”
Which is Ms. Spiller’s polite way of informing a Toronto-based writer, a city forever lampooned countrywide for calling out the army when the snowy-going got a little too tough for us mega-city folk, that Edmonton’s Snow Dirt Mountain deserves little more than a shrug.
“I’ve seen the pictures of it,” Ms. Spiller says. “But I don’t see that it is anything exceptional.”
Snow Dirt Mountain is a man-made, ever-growing mound of the snow and grime that city workers have been hauling from city streets since November. There are five different storage sites, and this one, in the city ’s west end, is the most prominent, achieving a measure of celebrity in the local newspapers. It is reportedly 200feet high and getting bigger all the time.
You can even find video clips of its massiveness on YouTube, and while it may be spring on the calendar there is more snow in the forecast for Edmonton. That must mean something, doesn’t it?
It does for Bob Dunford, Edmonton’s director of roadway maintenance and an expert in all things snowmound related. It means an- other day at the office and another day when summer still seems a long way off.
“What’s been getting us this year are the unpredictable temperatures,” he says. “We had a couple of January thaws — which never happens — but as soon as March hit it was right back into winter.
“But I have to tell you that the snow mound is nowhere near as big as it was in the spring of 2011. That’s the year where it became famous. It was twice as big then as it is now. 2011 was our winter for the ages.”
He theorizes that the mound’s continuing notoriety is attached to its high visibility — locals and out-oftowners alike can see it from the ring road that wraps around the city — as well as its proximity to a local television news station that immortalized the mound with a three-minute news clip during the “winter for the ages.”
What is there now, then, is a knock-off, a lesser snow dwarf that is impressive to
I don’t get why people are making such a fuss over it
the uninitiated eye but just another bump on a wintry landscape to Edmontonians.
“It’s all about perspective,” Ms. Spiller says, cushioning my disappointment.
But: Snow Dirt Mountain is pocked with air pockets and contains assorted treasures, including car parts, the odd bumper and the occasional slab of sidewalk concrete. There is no actual treasure, though, such as gold bars or $20 bills.
“We recycle the sand we use on our roads and the guys on those crews in the spring find coins — but nothing to get rich off of,” Mr. Dunford says.
You can’t ski on the mountain — too dangerous. Or hike. Or anything. All you can do is watch and wait for it to melt. It is usually a puddle by midJuly, except for the celebrity mound from 2011 that lingered on until mid-September.
Just in time for another Edmonton winter.