This picture was sent to us by Karen Nelson, formerly of Anchorage, Alaska. Some neighborhood kids and their dads built this wonderful snowman in somebody’s yard in Anchorage.
Check out the Anchorage Daily News coverage here.
Sounds like the kids didn’t set out to build a sixteen-foot snowman. The project just kept getting bigger and bigger. They ran out of snow and had to bring in more with wheelbarrows and buckets.
This is fantastic. I wonder what the head weighs. One of the dads said (of the torso), “it’s solid ice . . . I put the arms in with my power drill.” Well, pure ice weighs just over sixty pounds per cubic foot. Even though it feels like ice, the snowman is certainly less dense than the stuff you ice skate on. Let’s make a wild (hopefully conservative?) guess and say that the snow/ice is half as dense: thirty pounds per cubic foot.
The head is about three and a half feet in diameter. That would make the volume about 22.4 cubic feet. Applying my thirty pounds/cubic foot estimate would suggest that the head alone weighs at least 670 pounds.
That would crush you, but you’d die happy.
by Sally
Donoghue Nation - I love those hardy Alaskans. Instead of crying about the chilly temps and mountains of snow, they make ridiculously large snowmen. We could all learn a lesson from our friends up north.