Snow!
Winter hits in full force
When it snows in the Keweenaw Peninsula, it snows hard! In November, it snowed 17 inches in Keweenaw County. In the first week of December, it snowed 27 inches more. By the end of 2021, it had already dumped a total of 101 inches of snow in the Keweenaw. With the Calumet Air Force Station on the top of Mount Horace Greeley, the highest point in the Keweenaw, our numbers were even higher than that! It wasn't long before most of our roads were buried and impassable. Thanks to the high winds on the top of the mountain, snow drifts taller than a person formed between buildings and in doorways. The radar towers at the top of the hill may as well have been at the North Pole for how difficult they were to reach. Even with snowshoes you sink past your knees in some of the drifts, and unfortunately any hope of outdoor work on the base came to a halt.
No time to rest though
Even with the Keweenaw blizzards raging outside, there was still plenty of work to be done! By now we had two buildings completely sealed up from the elements with windows boarded and doors locked. This meant we could start the process of cleaning out the interiors and setting up shop. As with all of the buildings on the property, this meant hauling out a lot of debris and trash, scrubbing floors and walls, and removing 30+ years of accumulated filth. But in the end we managed to clear out a workspace that can serve as a home base and workshop for the rest of our work.
In addition to the work on the base, we also spent a lot of time on some of the behind the scenes work associated with the property. We've reached out to a lot of different organizations in Michigan and around the country, and there are a lot of exciting possibilities in the work! Several members of our group spent days digging through files at the Michigan Tech Archives and Keweenaw National Historical Park and have unearthed a treasure trove of historical documents related to the base, including newspaper clippings and original blueprints of the base! Stay tuned for some future blog posts and videos about this research!
All snowfall stats are from the Keweenaw County Snowfall Tracker
https://keweenawcountyonline.org/snowfall2.php
