Space Management – the art of arranging snow piles in a manner that allows for more snow. Sometimes so much snow falls here that it becomes an issue. The piles on the boulevards fall into the street, pushing the parked cars so far from the curb that the streets become narrow cow-paths. In the past, the city has declared one-sided parking for the season because the fire trucks can’t get down the street.

This pile of snow is actually fake. It was made with snow machines down by the lake, hauled in by dump trucks, laid down on the streets, and then a few days later scraped up and stacked here near the bike trail. OK, some nutter stacked the small pieces on top, but the whole pile of snow is a Minneapolis Parks Department creation.

Why? This is the long-term effect of the City of Lakes Loppet. That cross-county ski race that went through my neighborhood. They made a perfectly-groomed four-block-long trail right through uptown out of fake snow.

Yep, imported man-made snow in Minneapolis. As we Minneapolitains would say in the local dialect, “huh, that’s different.”