Folks up here call it “heart attack snow.” You might have heard the term before, or muttered it yourself halfway through a too-long driveway with a too-small shovel. It’s the kind of snow that’s heavy like wet cement and twice as stubborn. You don’t so much shovel it as you heave it like you're bailing out a leaking canoe.
It’s also showing up more often. That’s worth paying attention to.
Heart attack snow happens when temperatures hover right around freezing, say 30 to 34 degrees. The snow that falls under these conditions picks up extra water on its way down, or it half-melts on contact, turning what might’ve been a fluffy few inches into something closer to a slushy brick. A single cubic foot can weigh over 20 pounds. Multiply that by a whole driveway, and you're looking at lifting literal tons—something your back, heart, and snowblower motor might not be keen to do.
There's a reason the name stuck. Hospitals report upticks in cardiac events after storms like this, especially among older folks who feel like they can still tackle it the way they did twenty years ago. The combo of cold air (which tightens blood vessels), physical exertion, and high-stress lifting is a rough recipe for an overworked heart.
But there's another layer to the story, and it's not in your driveway. It’s in the air. These kinds of snowfalls are getting more common around here, and not by accident.
The North Shore’s weather is trending warmer and wetter. We still get snow—sometimes lots of it—but the texture is shifting. March used to mean dry powder over packed ice, winds howling off Superior, that crisp cold that carries sound like glass. Now? March brings rain, slush, snow, back to rain, fog in the woods, and nowhere for the melt to go. The lake doesn’t freeze up like it used to. And the storms that come off it are carrying more heat and more moisture.
We live in a strange liminal zone now, where winter isn’t gone, but it’s not what it was. Snow arrives later, leaves earlier, and doesn’t behave the same while it’s here. The oldtimers used to talk about "sugar snow", that dry, late-season stuff that made for perfect syrup boiling. What we get now in April is more like bread dough.
Climate models call it a “transition zone,” but it doesn’t feel like a model when you’re out clearing eight inches of wet glop that dropped in twelve hours. It feels like a different world knocking on the edge of this one. You can ignore it, for a while. Until your shovel snaps. Until the basement floods. Until the dead ash leans too far and takes out the power line.
So what do we do with this?
Start by not pretending it’s still 1985. If you’re going out to shovel, treat it like a workout: stretch, pace yourself, take breaks, push the snow rather than lifting when you can. Better yet, if you’ve got neighbors who aren’t as spry, offer to lend a hand—or better tools. And if you’re shopping for a new snowblower, don’t cheap out. The lighter-duty ones just can’t cut through this new kind of snow.
But bigger than that, we need to start building our towns and habits for this wetter, weirder version of winter. That means better drainage, roofs that can handle heavy dumps, more robust emergency services, and less reliance on one aging guy with a plow and a strong back. It also means sharing what works: sand mixes, efficient snow-melt setups, communal shovel libraries. Whatever we can do to make this less of an individual problem and more of a community response.
The weather’s not going back. But neither are we. We’re still here. Just have to get a little smarter, a little stronger, and maybe a little more neighborly about it.
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