Vacationers, Count Your Blessings

 Snow is fun to play in. Epic snow even more so. And if you're staying in lodging with a wood fireplace, it's nearly perfect.

For Tahoe locals, those things have to be maintained, and it ain't always easy.

Our wood stove chimney pipe has been ripped off the roof three times in one month. Thank you "Epic Snow" for sliding down a very steep roof.

Each time, I snowshoe up onto the roof to fix it. Yes, you read that correctly. We live in an especially snowy part of Tahoe, and the snow is up to the second floor and higher in some places.

I strap on my tool belt, grab a metal shovel, and slog my way through bottomless snow and up onto the roof to try to shovel out the area where the brackets that support the stove pipe have torn off the roof. All the while, I'm trying to gauge which way I'm going to dive if the snow above me decides to avalanche down on me. I even keep my phone in my pocket with the location setting turned on in case I end up under 10,000 pounds of snow with broken bones. My lame idea being that if I get buried, I might still be able to reach my phone and dial 911. Ha ha.

Each time I reattach the chimney, I use beefier lag screws and brackets. Each time, I hope maybe this time the chimney will stay put until summer when I can redesign the entire support bracing.

You may be thinking, why not just call in a roofing contractor to fix it? I have. They don't have a good system for custom chimney supports. And they're too busy with worse problems, like roofs that have been caved in by falling trees that collapsed under the epic snow load.

In the meantime, we'll double check that the chimney is solidly in place before we light a fire. We won't light a fire during a storm when snow is accumulating. And once it accumulates, we won't light a fire until we clear the roof near the chimney.

 And, of course, we always keep two fire extinguishers nearby.

But hey, Epic snow is great.