After a couple of dry years, my little corner of New York has been blanketed in snow more than a few times this winter. That’s given me multiple occasions to drive my neighbor’s snowplow, and boy howdy, is it fun.
Now, professional snow plowing involves long hours and stressful situations. Clearing miles of highway and huge commercial parking lots before the sun comes up is arduous, I’m sure.
I, however, only have to clear one driveway with no elevation changes. It’s just a single, straight shot of about 100 feet. Still, it sucks to shovel it. That’s part of the reason I befriended my neighbor—he’s got about 20 acres, a much longer driveway, and a retired municipal Ford Super Duty with a Fisher hydraulic plow on it. Ha, I’m kidding; I would have been buds with him either way (gotta cover myself in case he reads this).
But jokes aside, getting to use the full-sized plow rig has been a mega back-saving boon and a heck of a lot of fun.
Personal residential (recreational?) plowing is great because it combines the strategic driving of off-roading with the convenience of not having to leave your property, and the satisfaction of completing a chore. It’s that simple, really.
With the amount of snow accumulation we’ve had, a little planning is required to do the job right. The truck’s pushing power is not infinite, so you need to be a little thoughtful about where you pile the snow. It’s kind of like a Tetris-style puzzle: fitting heaps of precipitation into various corners of the property so that cars can easily be extracted later.
The plow blade itself, a colossal wing of steel repositioned with hydraulics, thumps and thuds around with hefty importance.
And all the while, you can hang out in a warm cab with your coffee and music, and maybe a companion if you’re very lucky (my wife had a turn too, while I sat in the passenger seat and squawked when she got within a few feet of one of my cars).
The Super Duty plow rig’s only real weakness is that it can’t go deeper into my property than the driveway. We’ve got a little walking path out back, between my place and the field where my in-laws’ horse lives, which is also pretty miserable to shovel. That’s why, as I’m typing this, I’ve got a smaller plow being mounted on my Polaris Ranger. That should be able to clean up most of my property when it’s up and running—but it’ll be a lot less luxurious. The Ranger uses its winch to raise and lower the plow, but tilting it left to right will require exiting the cab and physically making adjustments.
Oh well, it just means I’ll have to don some good gloves for Polaris plowing sessions. Here’s hoping I didn’t cancel snow for the rest of the season by investing in a plow of my own!
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