MOHAWK, MICH. -- Sandra Turnquist didn’t know what to expect when she got a phone call at work from her boyfriend, Mark Mezydlo, excitedly urging her to come home as quickly as possible because he had something to show her.
At first she thought maybe Mezydlo was about to propose, she said, laughing.
The surprise Mezydlo was so excited about did turn out to be white and sparkly -- but it wasn’t a diamond ring. It was a pile of snow. On July 24th.
Turnquist caught Mezydlo’s animated reaction to the unbelievable discovery on video that day and shared it later on Facebook. “This has got to be the last one in the U.P. I think I’m a little bit devastated,” she wrote in the post.
The video has now gone viral, with more than 5,000 shares by Friday evening, July 26.
“I didn’t even think this was going to go that far,” Turnquist said.
Mezydlo and Turnquist live in the Upper Peninsula community of Mohawk, which is about 25 miles south of Copper Harbor, the northernmost tip of the U.P.'s remote Keweenaw Peninsula. The region is known for having notoriously long, snowy winters -- but snow lingering through July? Shocking, even for a lifelong Yooper like Turnquist.
In this case, the stubborn snow pile had been buried, in part, by a mound of sawdust outside Mezydlo’s lumber mill business. Mezydlo discovered the icy mound when he was gathering kindling nearby for an upcoming camping trip.
“I was standing there picking up kindling and I thought to myself, ‘Why is this so solid?,’” he said. “I swept away like eight inches of sawdust and shavings, and there it was.”
It was the last bit of a snow-plow mound, Mezydlo said, adding that he suspects the sawdust had provided insulation, extending the snow pile’s incredible lifespan. At the time of the discovery, the mound was about a foot tall and roughly four to five feet wide -- though it has melted a bit since then, the couple said.
When asked if they had any special plans for this winter straggler -- a late-summer snowball fight, perhaps? -- Mezydlo and Turnquist just laughed.
“It’ll be a good base for when December rolls around again,” Mezydlo said.
At this rate, it really might just last ‘til the next snowfall.