The Thanksgiving Storm of 2025
Settling Into True Winter
Why is there so much snow here? I mean, all jokes aside, 90% of the reason I moved here was to chase the snow. The UP sees an average of 300 inches each winter, so I knew what I was getting myself into. What I didn’t know was how fast it would all happen.
Snowpocalypse 2025
The days before Thanksgiving are always busy with holiday planning on your mind, and this year was no different. I’m used to living far from family, so making the pilgrimage home came as no surprise. What shocked me was what happened in the 48 hours before the holiday.
Bessemer went from green grass and rain to more than 30 inches of wet, heavy lake-effect snow. I distinctly remember going to bed that night thinking the meteorologist on the local channel must have been smoking something ridiculous, because there was no way snow was going to stick to that wet, green, warm grass.
I woke up on the first morning of the storm to more than a foot of snow. And it was still snowing.
The Magic (and Mystery) of Lake-Effect Snow
I haven’t seen that much snow fall all at once since I was a kid in the early 2000s. Actually, I’ve never seen snow like this in my life. This snow was different. It’s called lake-effect snow, and it’s the reason winter here feels like living inside a snow globe.
Lake-effect snow is a skier’s dream—fluffy powder. It happens when a large body of open, warm water meets cold air. Water evaporates, rises, and dumps snow downwind of the lake. It’s extremely common on the southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes.
Luckily for me—someone who literally moved here for the snow, Bessemer sits about 20 miles south of an unusually warm stretch of Lake Superior. It’s so warm, in fact, that it’s known as one of the few places where you can “comfortably” swim in the Great Lake during the summer, while everywhere else hovers at a bone-cold 33 degrees. That warm water is a blessing for tourists in the summer and for skiers in the winter.
A Snow Globe Come to Life
That morning, the snow kept falling relentlessly. I dug out three vehicles, got stuck waist-deep in snow, and watched it continue to dump just as heavily for the next 24 hours as it had the previous 24. Slowly, I watched the UP transform into the winter wonderland their license plates always promised. And as we shoveled out those three vehicles, the realization set in: Thanksgiving with family in the Twin Cities was becoming less and less of an option with every inch that buried the streets.
In total, Bessemer received 40 inches of snow over the holiday week.
There’s no great way to explain what seeing that much snow is truly like—it consumes all your senses. Looking outside from the inside of my 100-year-old mining cabin felt like being in a snow globe, with white, fluffy flakes filling the streets. The roads were silent because no one could leave their homes. After the fourth round of shoveling, my whole body ached, but the plow trucks were stuck in their garages too. Watching snowbanks pile higher than cars rattled me. It was genuinely a new experience.
A Small-Town Gesture
In true small-town fashion, after returning a shovel I borrowed from a neighbor, they asked if we were still planning to brave the drive down to the Cities for Thanksgiving. And that’s when I got my first invitation to someone’s house!
But you’ll have to read about my Yooper Thanksgiving in the next one.
