Crowbar, you stole my line- “keeps the riffraff out”. (Present company excepted of course)
I live where I get about the same amount of snow that you do and we seem to have the same winter activities. We also have dogsled races and ice festivals here. We can get up to 300 inches of snow which turns out to be 25 feet but it melts down and snows again so it isn’t all overhead all the time. We get a lot of lake effect snow.
I used to enjoy wanking in a blizzard but I’m getting too old to enjoy that anymore. I read a book about the Donner party in a snowstorm and it made it even more understandable.