A Look Back: The Winter Of 1981-82

[RogueWaves]

Hmmm...maybe there were alot of Southwesterly and North northwesterly winds that winter....? That's when Muskegon does extremely well in the snow department...and Grand Rapids misses out. Then perhaps there were those times when the Westerly winds were so strong they just blew the snow over Western MIchigan completely and Grand Rapids got missed. If the Westerly winds are too strong here, they'll blow the snow right over the lakeshore to Grand Rapids, so if they were pretty strong to blow the snow the whole way to eastern MIchigan, I'm assuming the snow bands jumped over the whole area.

My ex was growing up in Plainwell back then. She said it was the winter when they had (7) Mondays in a row as snow days, so it must've been bad along that corridor of SWMI. Granted, GR is 45 miles north, and with more of a NW flow, could've been missed by the worst of it. But Genesee county is due east of GR and the winds/LES I remember would have been on W to WSW winds. Would’ve been strange for it to somehow “bypass” GR.

Yes the Winter of 1981-82 will well be remembered in SE Michigan as layers upon layers of snow on the ground. We totaled up 74" at DTW Metro Arpt but many areas just north of that into Detroit I suspect saw 80-100"+ I lived west of Detroit in Canton and the landscape contained layers of snow (almost like yu'd see in the polar regions..kidding but you get my drift-pun intended). I remember shoveling snow for my mom constantly and when I shoved the shovel down perpendicular into the unshoveled snow...and took a hunk out...it actually showed layers of slightly different shades depending on age, moisture content and dirt/melting.

I have a pics here of me and my co-employee Lena Bailey at DTW out on the air field. We had nice smooth but suble drifts 2-3ft high from numerous snows. It was a winter to remember and was the last great winter for snow that century and a fitting "tail" on the 1970s!

My memories also. In SEMI, we had numerous frz rain events during January as the same storms that buried the Twin Cities moved due east and buried N. Lower Michigan. On one Monday (or Tues?), they cancelled school due to the icy back roads but the main roads were okay, so my two skiing buddies decided they would head up to Boyne Mountain and called to invite me along. WOW is all I can say about the snow in the "up north snowbelts". It was a perfect winter day, 25 degrees and sunshine with the occasional snow shower. In the open farm country west of Gayord, they had used huge rotary blowers because the snow was about 5 foot on the level with drifted areas easily reaching 8+ feet. Growing up in SEMI, I'd never seen anything like it except maybe on TV in the mountain west. You could so easily see the (4) major storms/blizzards of 12+ inches each which had hit in rapid succession. We were told how they had rolled in on weekends and stranded everybody at the resorts. Hey, if you have to get stranded by a blizzard, what a better place, eh? (footnote, the only other time I've seen anything close was my first year skiing in another area of N. Mich. The year? Jan '79)

Seventies to early 80's rocked! Then the mother of El Ninos in '82-83 was really hard to take.