MINNEAPOLIS — You surely remember when that last patch of snow in your yard melted this spring. The folks at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are still waiting for that moment.
As of mid-July, the snow pile nicknamed "Mount MAC" — as in Metropolitan Airports Commission — still hasn't surrendered fully to the summertime heat.
It has shrunken quite a bit, measuring two feet high, way down from its 80-foot peak. And from a distance it looks more like a pile of sand.
But there's still a lot of compacted snow hiding beneath that layer of insulating sand. That was clear when MSP Field Maintenance Planning Manager Mark Rudolph chiseled his way into it with a shovel Wednesday afternoon.
"I really think this year without the rain, the drought conditions that we've had locally, it's probably extended the stay of the snow," Rudolph told KARE.
"There are some over and under possible bets within the department on when this snow will actually be totally melted. I'm going with August 4th because that's one of my child's birthdays. But we definitely hope it melts before the first snow fall!"
He said some workers can't even stand to look at Mount MAC anymore because it reminds them that the snow will return sooner than they'd like. But he sees the melting mountain of snow as a tribute to the people who created it.
"This took 160 full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees to make this pile happen over this past season -- dedicated employees who spent day and night here making sure the traveling public is safe."
Rudolph said Mount MAC was one of two huge piles where crews deposited snow, because it's a hazard to planes to leave it besides runways and taxiways.
They don't try to rush the melting process.
"We let nature go ahead and melt it and then we'll come do our cleaning after everything's dried out."
Once it fully melts excavators will remove the sand, dirt and debris. The sand will be repurposed as landscaping fill material for various projects on the airport grounds.