Let’s face it. We’ve been spoiled.
For the last couple of decades or so, winter hasn’t amounted to much. We’ve had mild temperatures and an occasional snowstorm. And this winter? Heck, it doesn’t hold a candle to those when I grew up.
Now, I’m not telling you I walked to school, uphill both ways, with snow up to my knees, but we definitely had winter. If the temperatures got up to zero in the month of January, we thought it was a heat wave.
I’m not sure how deep the snow used to be but I do know it was higher than our pasture fence. As kids, we would drag our wooden toboggan up the hill and slide back down, going right over the barbed wire.
Snowmobilers could ride any place they pleased. We had friends ride their sleds from Walton to our house outside of Oneonta. Try that today! I don’t think there was enough snow last year to allow folks to even start their sleds.
Around the area there were many ski places that don’t exist today: Deer Run in Stamford, Bobcat in Andes, Shoemaker Mountain in Little Falls as well as a dozen or so others. Where did they all go? They closed because they lacked snowmaking.
As you know, I ski at Belleayre Mountain. Yesterday, we skied on literally feet of manmade snow. Two miles away, in the little town of Fleischmanns, the ground was nearly bare.
When I was a boy, one of our fun activities was digging tunnels in the snowdrifts. We made snow forts and had snowball fights. We shoveled off a neighbor’s pond and ice skated there almost every night. With only four of us in the neighborhood, we still had some great hockey games.
Brewster Hill Road was right across the road from our house. The town plowed and sanded it, but only on the uphill side of the dirt road, so we could slide down the other side with our runner sleds. Of course back then we never saw more than a half dozen cars all day. Today the traffic is nearly non-stop.
Back then it was rare to have a snow day from school. Heck, they weren’t snow days, they were ice days. The back roads were too slippery for the school buses to safely travel.
Some of you will remember tubing at Glimmerglass State Park. When’s the last time that happened? How many of you ice skated at Neahwa Park in Oneonta when you were young?
When I taught school in the Adirondacks I was the boy scout leader. The snowmobile club took us all back in the mountains for a winter campout in a large log cabin.
That Saturday morning it was minus-45 degrees in Speculator. The woodstove in the cabin couldn’t keep the milk from freezing. I put two sleeping bags together and shoved two boys in together to keep them warm. We all survived without any frostbite.
We hiked on snowshoes intro Fawn Lake near Speculator one winter day to ice fish. After digging through more than three feet of snow, the ice was too thick to get to the water, so we went back home. Actually we stopped at the closest pub.
These random thoughts are flashing through my mind as I sit here and write. It’s nice to reminisce about the past. After all, fond memories are good for the soul.