Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
Darn it, Yellowstone Lake, why do you have to be so picturesque?
I mean, it’s almost too easy to get a good photo. What with that perfect blue and all those purty mountains and what not.
I mean, even that purely utilitarian snow stick looks good!
If you haven’t a clue what a snow stick is, aside from that yellow thing there, you’ve obviously never spent much time in snowier climates.
You see, when you get a foot or more of snow on the ground, little things like, say, the edge of the road become, well, tenuous at best. Sure, there’s an edge there, somewhere, I think, but good luck finding it.
Get more than three feet of snow or so, and well, even the road itself becomes vague. If there’s no trees or other tall things around, well, one flat area looks pretty much the same as any other. As do certain not-so flat areas that happened to get filled by drifting snow, like large ditches and the ilk. You see the problem.
So people in areas that regularly get a lot of snow came up with the ingenious idea of snow sticks. If there aren’t any tall things around to show the edges of things, why not just stick a bunch of tall sticks into the ground? That way anyone trying to go down the road, such as your friendly neighborhood snowplow, will actually stay on the road. Nice, simple, and cheap.
Snow sticks come in all sorts of styles and heights, from two-foot tall poles that double as reflectors to six foot tall stakes like the one in the photo. It all depends on how much height is needed, after all. If you only expect two-foot drifts, you don’t need a six-foot pole, after all.
On the flip side, if you see a bunch of those six-foot stakes lining the road, it might just be a clue that this area gets a wee bit of snow each year. After all, if they didn’t need that height, they wouldn’t bother making it that tall…
