Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/46527
n OUTDOORS | wINTER wOES more than makes up for it in the persistence department. More often than not, once the street in front of my house gets a coating of snow, it's pretty much there until almost when school's out. The really wild thing is that after a while my street turns into a giant slot car racing track like we used to have when I was a kid. You just turn off the nicely maintained, snow-free thoroughfare and up onto my street. I say up, because as the winter pro- gresses my street ends up at least a foot higher due to the buildup of glacial layers of snow. You settle into snow ruts that have been created and presto, slot car time. As tempting as it is to take your hands off the steering wheel and let the slot car do its thing, a firm grip is required because of the snow potholes that form within the ruts. The real trick is timing when you hit the pothole so it will bounce you out of the rut and into your driveway. More than once I've mistimed things and been bounced onto my front lawn. I really do need to admit that at least Never-Ending BY gRegg losInsKI While global warming may not be happening fast enough for some folks, I personally look forward to the winter and the more recent milder winters have gone far enough as far as I'm concerned. Not to sound like an old man, but in the old days the winters were a heck of a lot harder and I actually enjoyed them more. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago where you learned early the meaning of "Lake Effect." It meant that a winter storm would blow in and suck up about half of Lake Michigan and dump a few feet of moisture-sodden snow in your front yard. 106 Idaho Falls MagazIne Nov/dec 2011 None of the fluffy, hardly-there powder that we get here that makes skiing at Grand Targhee so wonderful; no the stuff we got was basically thick white rain that weighed a ton and made snow shoveling nearly impossible. The only good thing was that as a kid you could build incredible snow forts and snowballs took just a simple scoop. There have actually been times here when I tried to have snowball fights with my boys and we couldn't get the snow to stay together once it left our hands. Even though the snow here seems often to be lacking in the moisture department, it Winter once per winter, the city does try to clear my street. Of course, for some reason the only time the heavy machinery is available is in the middle of the night. The flashing orange lights are easy enough to ignore when sleeping, but the endless beep, beep of the backup alarms actually makes you glad that your street only gets cleared once per winter. Some streets are fortunate enough to have the snow plowed to the center and then chewed up by a cool conveyor belt machine that spits it into a waiting dump truck and hauled away. On my street, they create snow mounds nearly as big as the runs at Kelly's Canyon. These gritty gray monoliths often last until almost Memorial Day and serve as dams that prevent melting snow from draining from the end of drive- ways. So once the ruts are gone, the new challenge is gaining enough speed as you enter and exit your driveway so that you don't get stuck in the slush pit, kind of an urban bergshrund. When summer finally comes it always takes me a little time to adjust to having the drive down my street being a simple carefree affair, rather than another white- knuckle episode of Ice Road Truckers. Maybe global warming coming a little faster might not be all that bad after all.