By David F. Rooney
Best known for her prowess at golf, Lisa Longinotto has measured up a new kind of record: a record amount of snow on the ground here in town.
“The extreme was in 1982 when 173 cm was measured,” she said as she checked her log book before measuring the depth of the snow in her back-yard snow-measurement patch Thursday.
A few minutes later, she climbed on a ladder and drove a probe down through the snow, then inserted a two-metre measuring stick down the hole it left behind.
“We’re on par with the record,” she said with a smile.
Lisa, a volunteer climate data collector of Environment Canada, tracks snow in the winter and rain the rest of the year in her back yard as well as measuring stations in Big Eddy and at the airport, regularly sending that information to the federal department.
She gets a kick out of it, as she does about life in general, and still gets a chuckle out of the one-metre measuring stick that the department originally sent her.
“That’s not quite long enough for our snow,” she said. “We get way more than they do in most parts of the country.”
Interestingly, she says she understands there is actually less snow in the backcountry than usual, something Tom Dickson of the Revelstoke Snowmobile Club had mentioned to me earlier in the week when I ran into him at Southside.
Our weather does seem a little out of whack. And it’s still snowing at 1 am Friday. When will it end? Who knows. In the meantime, click here if you’d like to see more Revelstoke-related weather information or scroll down to see photos of Lisa at work.
