Into the Wild

A Little About Snow

For some, snow brings to mind tedious shoveling and dangerous driving. But the white stuff is also great to play in. Regardless of your point of view, here are a few fun facts for those snowy days just around the corner.

Compiled by Ron Trigg

The Basics About Snow Formation

The basic building blocks of snow are ice crystals that form from water vapor in clouds. Most of the time they grow around freezing nuclei, which can be specks of dust or floating organic debris such as bacteria, fungi, or pollen. Crystals come in an infinite variety, but almost all are six-sided, ranging from simple hexagons to finely branched stars. As they tumble toward earth, they collide and clump together into snowflakes, which can contain up to 100 ice crystals and be more than an inch across.

Fluffy or Wet

While the Inuit people of the Arctic may have as many as 200 words to describe snow, most of us think of it as being either dry and fluffy (easy to sweep off the driveway) or wet and heavy (a heart attack in the waiting). Temperature and wind direction determine which type we receive. When temperatures are close to or above the freezing mark, heavy, wet snow comes down. Colder temperatures in the teens or 20s produce light, fluffy snow. Winds from the northwest (the so-called Alberta Clippers) and lake-effect snow events bring light, fluffy snow, while weather systems coming up from the Gulf of Mexico tend to produce the heavy, wet stuff.

Human Fun in the Snow

Dry snow, often called powder, is the preferred variety for downhill skiing and snowboarding. Backyard adventurers, however, do better with wet snow that packs well — it’s always the best for building snow forts or making snowballs or snowmen. A layer of well — packed snow also enhances sledding. Indeed, the powdery stuff can be blown off the hill by the wind before you get a chance to enjoy it. A light dusting of snow, however, is best for observing animal tracks, which may reveal the existence of seldom seen mammals such as mink, fox, or even bobcat.

Animals in the Snow

Snow on the ground affects all animals, forcing them to change tactics for feeding, moving about, and finding shelter. Deer are poorly adapted for getting around in deep snow, and they often gather in large groups on “yards” of packed snow, where they quickly deplete all available food and may suffer from starvation. Birds such as robins, which can generally tolerate the cold, will migrate when snow cover of as little as three millimeters blocks access to food sources. Small mammals — mice, voles, shrews — carve out an existence in the subnivian zone between the ground and the snow layer, where a pocket of above-freezing air allows them to move around in relative warmth. But those same tunnels can also be a death trap if surface snow melts during the day and then freezes solid at night.

Plants in the Snow

While snow cover reflects away some of the sun’s warmth, it also provides insulation from the worst of winter’s cold for many plants. A layer of snow also protects by hiding many green plants from the voracious appetites of deer. On the other hand, shrubs and trees may suffer under these same circumstances. It’s not uncommon to find a browse line on shrubs and small trees where deer have eaten everything up to the highest level they can reach.

Snow of Many Types

Ice crystals, sometimes called snow crystals, are almost all six-sided, but they come in a great variety of shapes — needles, columns, plates, stars, and delicately branched stars (dendrites), to name a few. Snow grains are small, soft, white crystals of ice that fall to the ground in small amounts, somewhat like a frozen form of drizzle. Snowflakes are hexagonally shaped conglomerations of many ice crystals. Snow pellets or graupel are actually snowflakes that acquire frozen droplets of water during their fall to the ground. Sometimes called soft hail, they are crunchy underfoot.

Snowballs in History

Some accounts have it that the American Revolution began with a barrage of snowballs. A group of Bostonians, it is said, pelted British troops with rocks and snowballs on March 5, 1770, in Boston. This provoked the Redcoats into opening fire on the locals, resulting in the Boston Massacre.