How many snowmen in Jackson’s famous snow pile?
After one of the deepest snowpacks since 1952, the town of Jackson pushed much of the snow that landed in town into a large pile at the Teton County Fairgrounds parking lot.
Last year, they called it ” Heckuva Hill. ” This year, they took a 3-D heat map image to prove, that’s a lot of snow.
In fact, Jackson Streets Manager Sam Jewison estimates roughly 10,000 truck-loads of snow was hauled to the lot. On Wednesday, Jorgensen Engineering flew a drone over the hill. They estimate the maximum height at 50.5 feet with a volume of 199,400 cubic yards .
Like most good engineers, those numbers prompted additional mathematical queries. For example, how many snowmen could that pile of snow make?
Here’s what they found:
According to Roy Pruett , a Professor of Electrical Engineering Technology at Bluefield State College, it takes almost 19 cubic feet of snow to build the engineer’s ‘ideal snowman.’ Professor Pruett published an article entitled ” Cool Man ” where he calculated the design of a perfect snowman (Industrial Engineer: IE; Dec2003 , Vol. 35 Issue 12, p66 ).
With this calculation in mind, the amount of snow contained in Jackson’s snow storage pile could , in theory, be used to make approximately 169,673 snowmen. Jackson, Wyoming’s population , according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is 10,532. This would equate to about 16 snowmen for each individual in Jackson.
