The Blizzard of '68

The winter after the great Fairbanks flood of the previous year was memorable.

Mother Nature was not finished with us. She must have known that I would soon be leaving Alaska for good and she wanted to make sure I would remember what it was like.

I’ve read stories of blizzards on the Great Plains, but nothing I have read, or experienced since has come close to the one that hit Fairbanks in 1968, my last winter in Alaska (except one I experienced in Kansas in 1954).

At the time I was working in the small goods warehouse of J.C. Penney. Earlier in the year I obtained a temporary job helping to clean up a mess in their large goods warehouse. During a rainstorm the building developed a leak and damaged furniture and appliances. I was part of a crew hired to get the warehouse back into shape. The warehouse super kept me on when the others were let go on completion of the cleanup.

Towards the end of September I was transferred to the small goods warehouse. I was put to work in various areas of the warehouse so I could become familiar with the system. After 3 weeks the super said he was going on vacation for a couple of weeks and I was given the job of redesigning the roller system used to move freight around the warehouse. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the roller ways were laid out and it made moving freight off the dock a pain in the neck. I worked out a plan and the day before he left I sketched it out and got the go ahead to implement it.

The warehouse crew and I spent 3 days reworking the roller train. The new design was a great improvement. By the time the height of the holiday season hit we were unloading as many as four and five 40-foot semi-trailers a day. With the new system in place we were able to easily handle the load and at the end of the day the docks were clear and ready for the next day. All the freight that had come in that day was put away in the proper bays, and the store’s requests were all filled. My super was pleased with the way it worked and bragged about me to the main store managers, which eventually lead to me losing my job, but that’s another story.

About mid-November the weather, which had been 10 to 20 below zero, began to warm. Temps in the 20 to 35 above range were common and everyone was hoping for a mild winter. There were a few light snowfalls. The last week of November brought the heaviest snowstorm I have ever seen.

The weathermen were predicting a heavier than normal snowfall, with most predicting between 3 to 5 feet of snow. With that in mind, I got up early the next morning to clear our driveway on the side of a mountain about a quarter of a mile long with a gentle slope. We had a 48-inch wide snow blower, which under most conditions was more than able to clear the driveway in less than an hour.

Imagine my dismay when I found almost 4 feet of new snow already on the ground and more coming down so hard and fast that I could barely see across the parking pad, a distance of about 30 feet. After suiting up in cold weather gear, I fired up the snow blower and went to work clearing the drive. It took 3 passes to clear the full width, and by the time I finished the last pass, about 2 hours later, there was another foot of snow on the ground.

I said “To heck with it,” and climbed into my car, determined to make it to work. Putting my car into low gear and plowing through the snow, I managed to make it to the main highway into town in time to pull in behind a snowplow headed my way. More accurately it was a huge snow blower, like the type used to keep the Donner Summit highway open. I followed the plow into town, where every snowplow and dump truck the city had was busy removing the heavy snowfall.

By noon 3 feet of new snow had come down, with no end in sight. At work the snow was coming down so fast and thick that we could not see more than a few feet. After work I followed another snowplow home. By the time the storm ended in the early hours of the next day a grand total of 16 plus feet of snow had fallen in 24 hours. It took the city weeks to get the streets cleared. The city commandeered every flat spot in town, including the largest of the Penney’s customer parking lots, to use as temporary dumping grounds for the snow. By the time they were through piling snow in the parking lot the city had a mountain of snow almost 5 stories high covering most of the city block sized lot.

You want to talk about climate change? I’ve experienced changes that makes the “world is ending because of climate change” look like an easy walk down the boulevard. These power grabbing fear mongers keep changing their story. Remember one of their first threats was about “global cooling” and the movie Hollywood produced featuring glaciers moving in on New York? So how do we know they are telling the truth? They ain’t… their mouths are moving.