Digging Out from the Blizzard

Friday night after the three-four day blizzard, this is how much of our flatbed trailer we could see.

Snow was heaped under, around, and over it.   

And here is how the snow was heaped up in front of the garage doors of the parsonage where we'd been holed up most of the week. 

But the sun was rising and the storm was over, and Jonathan was determined to dig out and start for home in Colorado by that afternoon.

He and the boys shoveled as if their lives depended on it! 

They had some moments of despair as the truck could not pull the trailer out, even after much digging.

After a couple hours of work, they got the trailer dug out enough to pull it out of the major drift it was in. Beyond the trailer, drifts were covering bushes perhaps 7 or more feet deep.

Out in the blizzard, we found out later, people were dying. One died because of not being able to get to dialysis, and a child died from asthma because emergency workers couldn't get there in time. 

As my guys were digging out our flatbed trailer Saturday morning, fire chief Keith Lavery stopped to ask if they could come and help rescue someone and help dig out a stuck ambulance. So they got in on some excitement!   

Here is what the street looked like in Mission on our way to the mission headquarters.

Snow has drifted halfway up the church door, and even deeper at the corner. Keith's big pickup truck is virtually buried just beyond the church.

Here is just one scene we passed with semis frozen into the side of the road. At the mission office where rescue workers were being fed, we heard a rescue worker say that emergency workers broke two or three chains trying to pull some of the semis out.

 

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It was impossible to capture on camera the extent of the snow and drifts as we drove carefully on icepacked roads down from Mission, SD, through Nebraska. 

Just heaps and heaps of snow.  

And yet, it was also a winter wonderland! 

But we were so glad to be home!