A horse ride in the snow

Last Sunday into Monday morning, we received 18 inches of heavy wet snow. Most of the accumulation came overnight, so I was not able to remove the snow in two stages like I normally would with this size storm. So the old Wheel Horse garden tractor, with the single stage snow thrower, was put to the test in a big way.

Ever so slowly I would fill the auger and then back the tractor up so the engine could recover from the heavy load. Once a full swath was created as in the above picture, I could work each side of that swath just using 1/4 to a 1/2 of the auger. Throwing snow this way takes a lot longer, but is the only realistic way of dealing with this much heavy wet snow. Below is a picture of the job almost done.