Out of an abundance of caution, I cancelled my roadtrip to Calgary for today. At work yesterday, an email went out to all saying to use best judgement in the morning, but take some work home to do and basically see you on Tuesday. As civil servants, we already had Friday and Monday off for Easter.
There was no snow as I called it a night last night. I woke up once or twice through the night and did not hear the 70km winds necessary to call it a blizzard. As I look out on my deck now, we have a whopping 1/4 inch of snow.
The forecast is for 30 to 50 cm of snow, with 80cm possible in some spots. It had better hurry up, as it looks like I missed my trip over this. I'll be heading in to work in a couple hours, and make a judgement call through the day. The news last night said the RCMP were closing the highways in anticipation of this event, but I checked the road report and all appear to still be open.
I drive a RAM2500 with 4wheel drive and a winch. There are no trees around here, so the winch is for hooking onto other vehicles, not mine. If crap truly hits the fan, I can select one of the 6x6 trucks out in the lineup, although none are road registered. But when the weather gets bad enough, nobody will check. The tractor is already on the driveway just in case, there are 4 gas cans filled up with 2 in the garage and 2 out in the shed, some water cans filled, and extra wood brought in to the house for the woodstove. The flashlight batteries are all charged up. The generator is out in the shed, so if power does go out for an extended period, it needs to be dragged to the house and plugged into the panel.
At this point it all appears to be overkill, but we'll see what the day brings. Newspapers need to sensationalize to sell papers....like every next wave of covid, this may be one of those instances. While everyone at this point thinks we are having a major snow event, at this point it is basically what we here in Manitoba call a typical Wednseday morning.
Here is a link to a camera on the trans-Canada highway west of Brandon:
https://www.manitoba511.ca/en/cameras/brandon.html
As can be seen, at this point the roads are pretty bare. Closer to Winnipeg they do have a little snow, but nothing like what was forecast at this point.