Snowpocalypse 2011

As everyone probably knows, there was a blizzard of epic proportions on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  For a while overnight, snow was falling at 4 inches an hour (I think we got about 20 inches total).  There was even thundersnow.  We're located in Chicago, so it was a pretty big deal here.  Steve and I heard there were supposed to be 20-25 feet waves on the lake, so naturally we wanted to see for ourselves instead of staying warm at my apartment watching the Colbert Report.  We first tried to get out and see around 7:30PM on Tuesday, but visibility was very low.  We got to the bike path around Barry (on the north side of Chicago) and across the parking lot there, but we were getting hit with wind so hard we could barely keep our eyes open.  I almost got knocked over several times and my eyelashes started freezing in clumps.  It was practically white out conditions and suddenly a row of trees popped up about ten feet in front of us.  It was a little scary considering how close we were to the lake (maybe 20-30 feet away) that we couldn't see it at all. 

 We had a lovely chat with another adventure seeker.  He had made it up to the edge of the concrete steps/barrier around the lake (no beach in this spot) and was wearing ski goggles, and you still couldn't see anything.  The howling of the wind and the crashing of the waves was really loud though.

Ready for a snowy adventure

We hung out with a work friend for a few hours and then had another decision to make around 1am.  We could split up and go home to bed, or we could take another stab at going to see the waves crashing around the lake.  Of course, we decided to try to walk down to Fullerton beach.  Being outside in the middle of a blizzard was beautiful and exciting.  We were dressed really warmly, so that wasn't a problem, and as long as we weren't passing East/West roads (wind coming off the lake), the wind wasn't terrible.  We traipsed about clark street, singing an improv song about Thundersnow and marveling at the weather.  Trudging through snow is hard work, and it was easy to get out of breath, especially for someone with short little legs like me.

Here's the same car on Broadway near Oakdale, the one on the right is without flash, and the one on the left has it.

This is the intersection of Clark/Broadway and Diversey.

We got down to Fullerton, where the wind coming off the lake was really bad.  I noticed a lot of fire trucks and ambulances going by, and figured roads must be really bad with lots of accidents.  Going one block down Fullerton was the worst, where we noticed a cop car sitting near the entrance of the road to the beach.  We figured we couldn't get in to that area, so we turned south and aimed for the Armitage bridge over Lake Shore Drive, figuring it would give us a high point near the lake to view the water from.  We had to put on sunglasses at this point to not be blinded by the snow and wind, which wasn't that much better.  Steve tried to take a video of me, but you can't hear anything even though I'm only a few feet away.  We encountered a few stalled out buses later on, stuck in the snow.  One had slid into a parked car.

On our way home, we noticed that a man was inside, even though the lights were off.  We stopped and talked to him a little, and he said that he had to sit with the bus until a tow truck came.  This was at 2am, and he had been waiting there since around 9:30 pm (when he was supposed to be done with work).  He was very nice though, and offered to let us sit on the bus for a while and warm up.

We kept walking, past this tunnel under sheridan getting snowed in. It took us maybe about an hour and a half to walk from Oakdale to armitage, which is at least twice as long as it usually takes.  Around the LPZoo it started getting freaky windy again (it was moderately windy the whole time, but this was windy enough that it started feeling unsafe).  The wind was strong enough that it almost blew me over.  We made it into the stone structure on the south side of the zoo (the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial) and took shelter here, after walking through some snow drifts higher than my knees and then across a patch of ice where all the snow had been blown off.  (The wind almost blew me across the ice).

(Picture not by me)  This is about 400 ft from LSD, and it was hard to make out the cars on the road, to say nothing of the lake.  We looked out diagonally through those archways while being shielded from the wind.  We never made it any further than this, as it seemed dangerous enough, it was hard to stand in the wind, let alone walk, and the bridge swayed pretty easily from car traffic, not counting 70 mph wind.

Across a small pond by the Zoo is LSD, obscured by snow

While looking out at LSD, I noticed that something was flickering on the road.  At first I thought it was waves, but then I realized it was headlights flickering in the wind.  I don't have a TV (just internet), so I hadn't heard cars were trapped on the road until then.  It was kind of a freaky moment.  I wanted to help, but I couldn't think of any way to do so.  

Zoomed in, it was hard to get a steady shot with the wind.
You can tell the orange light is a CTA bus.  This is at 2:30 am.

We made our way back to Fullerton, stopping to ask the cops in the car that we had previously seen if we could help at all.  They just responded by saying "Got a shovel?" and saying there really wasn't much we could do.  So we continued until we got to our respective homes (around 3:30), where we warmed up and I got a call 2 1/2 hours later to come into work to help (I work at a retirement home) since many other workers were snowed in.

Sad, buried moped on Oakdale

~Beth