Making a Snowman

Yesterday, as afternoon temperatures ascended into the 50s, the young and the old among us gathered at the lake to cook hotdogs over an open fire.  Snow, at this point, has mostly melted from the landscape around the lake.  But on the lake, the ice holds firm at over a foot thick, and a layer of snow remains atop the ice.

As luck would have it, the temperature and water content of the snow was ideal for making a snowman.  Such conditions are surprisingly rare.  Here in Montana, especially, we tend to have a powdery snow that behaves more like dry sugar.

The snowman building process started on the ice just offshore with great enthusiasm.  Tad and Stacie St. Clair, along with their two boys, began rolling and packing big snowballs across the perfectly flat surface.  The passion for making a snowman lasted only a couple minutes in the children.  Pretty soon, Sawyer, the smallest boy, found poking blue hole in the white snow with a stick far more entertaining.  Cooper, the older of the two boys, soon drifted back toward the fire.        

Gripped by a certain romanticism, the two adults continued on.  Quickly enough, a snowman stood tall near the frozen shoreline.  Tad finished his sculpturing by adding, as a final Montana touch, a set of deer antlers.

There!  A snowbuck.

—Mitchell Hegman