On Tuesday, temperatures in Copenhagen, New York were more than ten degrees above freezing. The postmaster told a Los Angeles Times reporter, who was writing a story about the town’s status as the snowiest place in America this winter, “Oh my god, it’s a heat wave.”
Between January 30 to March 3, it never went above freezing in Copenhagen, a town with 801 residents that is perfectly situated in a snowy vortex between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks.
The Syracuse Post-Standard talked to the man who counted all that snow, Bill Hanchek, who has been Copenhagen’s federal snow-measurer for 23 years. He has counted more than 20 feet of snow since the middle of November. Hanchek doesn’t plan on his counting days ending anytime soon, either. “We had a trace amount of snow Memorial Day weekend in 2013,” he told the Post-Standard.
Although such dizzyingly high snow drifts might put fear in the heart of anyone who lives in a place that suffered through mere inches of snow, Copenhagen residents are pretty proud of the fact that they deserve to have seasonal affective disorder (or at least the highest number of snow forts per capita) more than anywhere else in the United States. (At least in places that have weather volunteers, like Oregon, which is sad it wasn’t even in the running this year. Some places in Alaska haven’t attracted any precipitation obsessives yet and very well might have beat Copenhagen’s snow record if anyone had been there to count it.) The mayor, standing outside the village hall in boots, told a local news station, “It’s abuzz, the village is buzzing.”
It’s hard not to feel immense love for blustery weather after seeing how much (Stockholm Syndrome–induced) affection the people in this local news clip have for it.
