November 27-28, 1966: Ferocious Gale and Snowstorm
This storm hit at the peak of Thanksgiving weekend return-trip travel. The week leading
up to the storm had been mild and the thawing weather and rain put a damper on the
second week of deer hunting season. During Thanksgiving weekend, an upper-air trough
began to form and deepen over the central United States. At the surface, low pressure in
south-central Canada, which had been pumping mild, southerly winds into the Upper
Great Lakes, began to fill, while new low pressure formed in northern Missouri ahead of
the deepening trough in the Plains. The Missouri low became the main system and
strengthened rapidly, drawing in cold air from the north. Rain quickly changed to
freezing precipitation and then snow from northwest to southeast across Upper Michigan.
As the storm intensified and lifted northeastward, gale force winds began to buffet the
region.
Richard Wright, an instructor at Northern Michigan University in Marquette at the time,
was visiting family in the Menominee County community of Daggett that Sunday. “It
was raining and blowing,” he recalls, “and we were concerned about the weather farther
north. We left right after lunch and things were fine until we got to the snow belt around
Trenary. It started to deteriorate fast and by the time we got around Skandia, traffic was
down to one lane.” He and his wife made it to their home in Harvey. Later that evening
they lost power, and with it, their source of heat.
They were not alone. Thousands of homes throughout an eight-county region of central
and eastern Upper Michigan lost heat and cooking facilities as wind gusts to 60 miles-anhour caused massive power failures. Curtis, in Mackinac County, went without power
from 4 p.m. Sunday until well into Monday. The Chippewa County community of
Rudyard was blacked out too, as five miles of ice-laden utility poles around the town
were brought down by the wind. Farther west, Munising also experienced a blackout that
caused the city’s hospital to use emergency backup power. Vicious winds snapped trees
and flung them onto power lines around Marquette. The wind was so strong it blew
spray from Lake Superior across U.S.-41 near the prison. It was the first time residents
had witnessed that spectacle in many years. Half the city was without power at the height
of the storm. Baraga and Delta counties also suffered extensive outages.
Only a few inches of snow fell in the Copper Country during the storm, while on the east
end four to five inches accumulated at the Sault with no real problems. The central and
much of the rest of eastern Upper Michigan bore the brunt of the storm. Over a foot of
snow accumulated in Marquette. The full gale accompanying the blizzard piled up drifts
eight to nine feet deep between Marquette and Negaunee with even deeper drifts around
Skandia.
Larry Wanic grew up near La Branche in northern Menominee County and enjoyed an
extra day of Thanksgiving holiday vacation because of the storm. “I remember the
fields,” he recalls. “There was hardly any snow. It didn’t snow more than six or seven
inches in this area, but the fields were like you see in North Dakota. They were bare and
then you’d have places where the drifts would be five feet.”
The blinding, blowing snow brought traffic to a complete standstill during one of the
busiest travel days of the year. Hundreds of vehicles became stranded along main
thoroughfares throughout the region, from the straits westward to Baraga County. In the
Green Garden-Skandia area alone, about 200 vehicles became mired in drifts on U.S.-41
south of Marquette. Most of the stranded travelers camped out on the floor of the
Idletime Bar near Yalmer Road and stayed there through much of the next morning.
Stalled vehicles still lined the highway on Tuesday morning the 29th, a day after the storm
ended.
Joe Freeman of Engadine, a small town in western Mackinac County just north of U.S.-2
on M-117, remembers a Greyhound bus stranded in the main intersection of the town at
the height of the storm. “Its windshield was busted,” he says. “It was the wind that must
have blew an evergreen branch or something…through the window.” The bus was full of
students heading back to Northern Michigan University and Michigan Technological
University from downstate. The students were herded over to the Town Hall where they
were forced to spend the night. “The manager of our store opened up and made
sandwiches for the kids,” recalls Freeman.
The store manager made lots of sandwiches that evening. After a 75-mile stretch of U.S.2 from the straits to Blaney Park became impassable, 500 students and motorists took
shelter in the Engadine Town Hall. Freeman says the students had no goulashes or boots,
so some of them put on the town’s firemen’s boots housed at the hall. “The powers-to-be
didn’t like that too well,” remembers Freeman with a chuckle.
Farther north in the woods of northern Luce County, tragedy struck as the blizzard
peaked. The proprietors of Pike Lake Resort had just closed the place down for the
winter, as the last of the deer hunters headed south. Faye Leighton had operated the
resort since 1941. A widow for over 20 years, she married a longtime family friend,
Leslie “Doc” Purman in 1964.
As darkness fell that Sunday evening, the couple left isolated Pike Lake and headed
toward Newberry on one of the backwoods roads. They became stuck along the way and
apparently decided to walk to the Pine Stump Junction Bar for help. The pair struggled
through the biting wind and blinding snow for nearly four miles. Exhausted, they
probably decided to rest for a while. Their frozen bodies were found cuddled up in a
snowdrift beneath a cedar tree on December 1, three days after the storm ended.
Ironically, they were less than a half-mile from their destination. A ferocious gale and
snowstorm rendered a short hike an insurmountable obstacle that evening in late
November 1966.