NEWS

Snowiest place in New York has 25 feet and counting

Steve Orr
@SOrr1

For most of us, a foot of snow is an intimidation. For Carol Yerdon, it’s a milestone.

By Sunday morning, more than 24 feet of snow had already fallen this winter in the corner of Oswego County where Yerdon lives.

Then it began to snow again. A foot or more was in the forecast. By noon Sunday, enough fresh snow was on the ground that Yerdon had hit her mark.

“Yes we did it! We hit 300 inches,” Yerdon said. “Just 125 inches to go to break the record!”

A snowy road in Redfield, Oswego County, which has had more than 300 inches of snow this winter.

Yerdon, an unabashed snow lover, lives in Redfield, a heavily forested, sparsely populated town that is about  90 miles east-northeast of Rochester

In winter, though, it’s worlds away.

Redfield sits atop the Tug Hill Plateau — the snowiest place in New York and, in many winters, the snowiest place in the eastern United States. Its only real rival, research shows, is the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

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Both lie in the heart of lake effect snow country, where whiteouts and huge drifts are commonplace.

This winter, Redfield is the hand’s down leader in snowfall, with 5 feet more than any other observation point on the Great Lakes.

It's in line, then, to win the inaugural Gold Snowdrift Award, which the Democrat and Chronicle has devised to honor the snowiest place in the Great Lakes region.

The award, devised by the D&C, will go to the Great Lakes community with the most snow each winter.

Yerdon, who has been the official National Weather Service observer in Redfield for more than two decades, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It’s a cozy time of year,” she said. “I try to put a positive spin on it and delight in seeing the ‘fun’ side of it once the hard work is done.”

Just as the Keweenaw Peninsula gets much of its snow from Lake Superior, Tug Hill owes its thick wintry blanket to its proximity to Lake Ontario.

Huge bands of lake effect snow whip up over the lakes each winter, blow ashore and dump their load on the uplands in Oswego, Lewis and neighboring counties. Storms, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning, can last for days. Snowfalls of 2 feet, 3 feet and more are not uncommon.

It’s a whole other world than Rochester, which is one of America’s snowiest big cities, yes, but nothing like Redfield.

Carol Yerdon's dog, Rose, romping in the snowdrifts.

“I’ve been going up there to see the snow every year since I was in college — the last 15 or 16 years. This year was about the highest I’ve seen up there,” said Jon Hitchcock, a weather service meteorologist who attended the State University College at Oswego. “I measured 64 inches on the ground in Redfield. It was pretty impressive.”

Other spots in Tug Hill often get more snow than Redfield. But this winter, winds have been from just the right direction to bury the place.

The crossroads in Redfield where Yerdon lives had 309 inches and counting by Monday evening. The next highest totals on the Great Lakes, according to research by the Democrat and Chronicle, are about 236 inches in Houghton, Michigan, and 230 inches in Osceola, a Lewis County town 6 miles east of Redfield.

Average winter snowfall in Redfield is 288 inches. The record there, which Yerdon yearns to see broken this winter, is 424.5 inches.

A good portion of Redfield’s snow fell in one epic dose earlier this month. Between Feb. 1 and Feb. 4, a lake effect storm deposited 71 inches there. By Feb. 10, a total of 122 inches had fallen.

That’s 10 feet in 10 days.

“Living in an area that receives such large amounts of lake effect can be very exciting as well as exhausting,” Yerdon said. “Shoveling and plowing are done daily, sometime multiple times per day during big storms. The key is to keep up with it.

“You never plan to get out and do too much away from home because if you get out of your driveway, it might snow enough while you’re gone so you can’t get back in."

Lake effect snow is created when air passes over relatively warm water, picking up moisture as it goes. The longer the stretch of open water, or the fetch as it's known, the more moisture is wicked up to form snow.

Winter often brings strong, persistent winds from the southwest, west or northwest. When they pass over the longest fetches of water, you get the Great Lakes snowbelts on the southern and eastern shores of Lake Superior, and on the eastern and southeastern shores of Huron, Erie and Ontario.

Not all snowbelts are equal, though.

The areas south of Buffalo that lie at the downwind end of Lake Erie can get enormous snowfalls — but Erie freezes solid most winters, cutting the lake effect season short. The snowiest spots there average under 200 inches annually.

To a lesser extent, Lake Huron ices over too. That plus a shorter fetch limits the snowiest parts of Canada’s Great Lakes shoreline to an average of about 150 inches per winter.

Parts of Lake Superior remain open during most winters, and Lake Ontario rarely freezes. That helps explain why Keewenaw and Tug Hill get so much snow. In addition, both areas are elevated hundreds of feet above water level, which enhances snowfall.

In Keewenaw, they're as proud of their snow as folks in Tug Hill.

“We’re up at the top of the list,” said Steve Jurmu, a photographer who lives near the base of the Keewenaw Peninsula and runs a website that celebrates the Upper Peninsula. “We get those winds from Canada. We usually see snowflakes in September. This year we saw some Oct. 8,” Jurmu said.


“It’s been a normal winter. We’re probably going to hit the 300-inch mark,” he said drolly.

A snow-covered home on the Keewenaw Peninsula, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.


Redfield, though, is already there, and Yerdon couldn’t be happier.

“Our winters have been known to stretch into mid-April or longer so there is still plenty of time to add to this total and possibly break a record,” she said. “We can do this.”

SORR@Gannett.com

When Hooker isn’t Hooker

New York's eye-popping snowfall record of 466.7 inches — that's almost 39 feet — was set in the notoriously harsh winter of 1976-77. 

The record book shows the mark was set in Hooker, a name etched in the minds of all Empire State snow lovers.

But it wasn’t set in Hooker at all.

Today Hooker is only a flyspeck, but it once was a populated settlement in the southwestern part of Montague, a town in Lewis County. A volunteer who lived there began measuring snowfall and other parameters for the weather service more than a century ago.

Eventually, that person stopped his or her work, but after a period of time, someone else nearby took up the task. Weather service policy is to retain to name of the observation point even if it moves a few miles, so the data continued to be recorded under “Hooker.”

By the winter of 1976-77, weather service officials in Buffalo say, the person submitting snowfall reports for “Hooker” actually lived four miles from the original spot, in the northern part of Montague.

By rights, Montague's the name that should be in the record book.

“Hooker,” by the way, has moved again. The person who measures snow under that name resides near the Lewis County village of Copenhagen, a dozen miles north of where the Hooker measurements were originally made.