The Blizzard of '68

The winter after the great Fairbanks flood of the previous year was memorable.

Mother Nature was not finished with us. She must have known that I would soon be leaving Alaska for good and she wanted to make sure I would remember what it was like.

I’ve read stories of blizzards on the Great Plains, but nothing I have read, or experienced since has come close to the one that hit Fairbanks in 1968, my last winter in Alaska (except one I experienced in Kansas in 1954).

At the time I was working in the small goods warehouse of J.C. Penney. Earlier in the year I obtained a temporary job helping to c...