Thanksgiving Blizzard - another memory

In 1993 I was just out of college. I had moved from my home state to a small town in North Dakota and was teaching school there. During the interview process the previous spring my host family had told me that during the winter it was just cold, brown and ugly; that they got very little snow. The summers were generally hot and dry. Well, I moved into the town in early July of 1993 and experienced not a hot and dry summer, but a cool wet one. That winter was also unusual with the first snow flurries falling in September.

From my journal:
We had our first big snowfall Thanksgiving weekend. Though the temperature stayed in the mid-twenties, it snowed a lot. It started Wednesday evening, and continued all day Thursday and finally quit for a while Friday.
When a church member brought me back from Thanksgiving dinner late that evening, his truck was pushing snow with the cattle guard.

Here is what the National Weather Service Website recorded about that storm:
A Large Part of North Dakota - a slow moving and enormous storm over North America brought record single-storm snowfall to much of North Dakota. Over two feet of snow fell over a large part of central and southeast North Dakota, and most of North Dakota had over a foot of snow from this storm.
At the National Weather Service office in Bismarck, 28.3 inches of snow was measured during the 108-hour snow event. This amount set a new single-storm record for snow in Bismarck. The snow began the evening of the 22nd and did not end until the morning of the 27th. Except for about six hours during the day on the 26th, the snow was continuous through this period. The snowfall was intermittent over most of North Dakota during this lengthy event. Fortunately, the wind was only 10 to 25 MPH during this storm, so it was well below blizzard conditions and blowing and drifting of snow was not a problem.
The storm occurred during the week of Thanksgiving, so many travelers were stranded. The prolonged snowfall kept snow removal crews working around the clock, and a few motorists crashed into the snowplows. Out in the rural areas, some farm buildings collapsed in the heavy snow.

Click here to see what my house looked like at the end of that storm:
There was so much snow that winter, I finally called my friend and told her she lied to me; that I had never seen so much snow at one time in my life. Subsequent years did prove to me she was generally right, but what an introduction to the Midwest!