Good times in the big snow

Besides the digging and shoveling, family members had some fun in the snow on Sunday after the blizzard passed. Here are some photos collected from Facebook. We'd always like to add more!

Bea and Dad. Do we dare venture outside?

Yes! And isn't this cool! Snowy Central Park.

Just chillin'

Xander and his friend relax in their fort.

Meanwhile, Brian takes care of serious business.

Now that's a snowman!

Blizzard of 2016 brings beauty, hard work

Kathy shares this beautiful photo of her house as the Blizzard of '16 was winding down Saturday night. A National Weather Service spotter in nearby Scarsdale measured 19 inches of snow from the storm.

Reports for the Baltimore suburbs were in the range of 30 inches. Doug and Lisa managed to do quite a job of digging a path to their door on Saturday night.

Here at Birch Street HQ, where the snow and wind continued until late Saturday night, we waited until Sunday morning to tackle the shoveling. By then the sun was shining brightly on the thick coat of snow. Dan measured 20 inches, while an NWS spotter nearby reported 24 inches. And those drifts by the car were certainly higher than that.

Christine takes a brief break

Making good progress

Nanette took this picture from her home on Shelter Island. Daughter Courtney, in Florida, wrote: "Not going to lie -- a li'l jealous of my mom's winter wonderland."

The storm also reached up to Cape Cod, where Owen took this next photo in his driveway. "It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be," he writes, "but I wish I had a two-car garage."

"My guess is we got at least a foot," Owen says. "My plow-and-shovel guy came twice to clear the snow, and the roads are not bad, so I'm not stuck in the house. Hope there's no repeat of last year!" Just about a year ago, he and brother Austin, visiting from Florida, were snowed in by a blizzard that dropped about 2 1/2 feet on the Cape (See that story).

Now back to Maryland, where Hugh and Dolores were able to watch as workers at their Oak Crest Village home shoveled the path from the entrance to the parking lot. Hugh then started working on digging out their car.

The Blizzard of 2016 climbs up the East Coast

Updated at 5 p.m. with new info and photos

We hope all our family members in the path of today's blizzard are hunkered down safely!


In Virginia, Marie reports it started snowing about noon Friday, and during the night "came down so hard you could hear it hitting the house." When the snow and wind let up a bit on Saturday morning, Xander was more than ready to venture out. "Judging by how high it is on Xander, it's got to be a foot and a half so far," Marie said. And the snow was expected to continue all day.

Lisa sends along this photo of the front yard at the Riderwood house, where the brick wall along the street was just about buried by 2 p.m. As you can see from the pre-storm photo, that wall's a couple feet high at least, but presumably the snow is drifting. The pre-positioned measuring is hard to read, but it had shown 15 inches at 9 a.m. so it's probably over 1.5 feet.

UPDATE: The wall is gone! Fully covered as of 4:30 p.m. "Still coming down," Lisa says. "Twenty-seven inches in 25 hours."



Liz adds these photos from downtown Baltimore.


Here are Birch Street Headquarters, no one's going anywhere for the day, and we figure we'll just let the snow pile up and deal with it tomorrow.


In this 11 a.m. view of the back yard, you can kind of make out the picnic table in the foreground. It looks like it had 8-10 inches on it so far. By 2 p.m. it was at least a foot, and the forecast called for it to continue falling until midnight or later.

UPDATE: At 3:20 p.m. Dan measured 18 inches in the front yard and trudged through it to take this photo of HQ from the street.

Let us know how you're doing and send us your snow pictures! birchstreetweb@gmail.com