Armidale had an epic snow day on August 2 of 2025. It feels important to write about how I think about snow days in relation climate change adaptation, because my weathering station is all about considering how a different kind of human-weather relationship could lead to a different kind of climate change adaptation. The snow day was one of my earlier forays into this kind of thinking.
The snow took us all a bit by surprise (since the recent snow forecasts for the city had not amounted to anything). This was more than most people living here had seen before. Anaiwan country is high country. it is country known for frost and intermittent snow. Armidale has a very detailed citizen-science style meteorology history website and the history books suggest snow like this hasn’t been seen here since 1984 (though surely this page will be updated soon to include the 2025 event, it hasn’t at the time of writing).
The day was magical until things got serious. No one expected it to get quite as serious as it did. We fortunately decided to stay put, content with the amount of snow on our street and food in the cupboard. Between 15 and 40cms of snow felL Depending on where you were on the tablelands. It was wild. We didn’t lose power. But We learned that the chain reaction of Snow making evergreen tree branches heavy (especially native eucalypts that are prone to dropping large limbs without warning even in fine weather) onto power lines is the main risk; well that and not being able to get anywhere unless you own a truck. People got stuck on roads and lots of folks lost power. The clean up is proving tricky with stray branches everywhere all over the place. Some still teetering in the trees above us. The university campus is a mess. closed all week. so is my son’s school which is in a heavily wooded area. I guess if we had snow storms more often all the trees would be ready for the load (evolved over the long term not to drop branches so chaotically, or just pruned accordingly). These things, the closures, the damage, the power outages are very frustrating. Although This is a non-sequitur, I feel like sharing that one of my favourite albums of all time is called “The POwer Out”.
As well as loving that album, I have an established track record of professional fantasising about snow days. I don’t get to write sentences like that very often, but I can write it here. and it is true. i once gave a paper called “snow day” that was turned into a book chapter you can read here in PDF. The paper/chapter from the event/book series “Hacking the anthropocene” and is about how a snow day could form the a basis of a good framework for thinking about how we might address climate change: letting the flow of life be interrupted, changed and slowed by the weather. the snow day is the more extreme example of this. I mean it more subtly too – slow down in the heat, sleep more on the cool long nights. Of course there are risks in a snow day. but if you control for all the really severe ones risks, the Inconvenience of the snow is my point. slowing down is the challenge presented by the snow day.
of course I agree with the umpteen caveats you can issue about the frustrations and dangers of snow day. the damage, the school closures, the risks of losing refrigeration for a long period of time. but ultimately i do believe in the principle of being moved more extremely by weather, letting it disrupt and change plans and slow us all down. I write this in bed with covid with travel plans for the week totally thwarted. I’m sad. But i’m disrupted and slowed. I’d prefer not to be sick. I hope it doesn’t get much worse. But I am open to the forced pause.
Here’s some pictures:
Community Weathering Station (Cows) 