RpR you hit the nail on the head for posts. We always refer to Bemidji area as down south. That is the area we were living, now we are a further 120 miles north of that just west of the so called "Ice Box or the Nation" (my hometown area). I think about 1/2 of the hometown area kids that grow up and leave tend to navigate to Fairbanks Alaska because it is familiar to them, the not so crazy about the cold ones move to Anchorage or other coastal areas. For years I complained to my husband that the winters are killing me and I thought we should move west. We ended up at the end of the Kenai peninsula in Alaska (230 miles south of Anchorage) a considerably milder climate then this part of the country. I was shocked and stunned to realize all those miserable bitter cold winters were in some ways much easier to cope with then the much milder but coastal moisture and soggy wet snow. The second winter we were there I thought we were going to get buried alive in snow. They ran out of places to put it clearing the streets and had to get special permission to pile it near the ocean. Several commercial businesses had their roofs collapse from the weight of the snow. Our winters here are so cold that it never occurred to us that the intense cold dry meant we rarely had to cope with ice conditions which are a nightmare in coastal cold climates.
