A HUG!*: AMERICAN SNOWBALL 
9i 
A Huge American Snowball. 
BY CHARLES XEVF.RS HOLMES, NEWTON, 
MASSACHUSETTS. 
Of course all of us have at some time 
in our lives thrown one or more snow- 
balls. Even older men like to see how 
far they can hurl one of these closely 
compacted balls, to compare the dis- 
tance it will go with that which 
it went many years ago. And if the 
thrower be a man who has completed 
his fiftieth year, he will probably derive 
little satisfaction from his attempt. 
aware, more snow is precipitated dur- 
ing some years than during other 
years. Therefore, we must compute 
the average annual snowfall. This av- 
erage annual snowfall amounts to as 
much as ten to thirty feet in the Sierra 
Nevada region, to about eight feet in 
the state of Maine, while in certain 
parts of our country there is little or no 
precipitation. Our forty-eight United 
States contain a total area of about 
eighty trillion square feet and, if we 
subtract from this the area upon which 
A NATIONAL UNITED STATES SNOWBALL, COMPARED WITH 
/64 WASHINGTON MONUMENTS AND 9 A GREAT PYRAMIDS. 
164 
WASHINGTON 
MONUMENTS 
17 N7/LES 
Not only his range but also his ac- 
curacy will be sadly impaired. He will 
not be able to hit even a barn door, and 
it may be that he cannot throw a snow- 
ball as far as that door. 
(You don’t “hit” me, even at sixty- 
one! E. F. B.) 
Now snowballs vary in size accord- 
ing to the individual bigness of the 
hands which form them. Some boys 
and girls make large snowballs, other 
boys and girls very small ones. It is 
probable that a snowball having a 
diameter of about two and one-half 
inches would approximate the average 
size of all the snowballs which were 
ever thrown. Of course several boys 
together can roll up a tremendous 
snowball, but neither they nor all the 
boys and girls in this country could 
make a snowball as huge as the one 
about to be described. Such a snowball 
would be formed from the total amount 
itf snow falling upon the United States 
during the period of one year. 
We all know that such a national 
snowball would be a stupendous one. 
To find out how large it would be, we 
first compute the total amount of snow 
falling upon the Lhiited States during 
the course of one vear. As we are well 
a lesser amount of snow descends, we 
have left seventy trillion square feet, 
upon which will fall an annual average 
of a little under six feet. Then if we 
multiply seventy trillion square feet by 
this annual average, we obtain four 
hundred trillion cubic feet, and 400,- 
000 , 003 , 000,000 cubic feet approximate 
the total average yearly snowfall in the 
United States. 
If this stupendous amount of snow 
were spread all over our country, over 
its 3,026,789 square miles of territory, 
each of these square miles would con- 
tain about one hundred and thirty-two 
million cubic feet of snow. In other 
words, each square mile of the United 
States would be buried under some- 
what less than five feet of snow. And 
were all this frozen precipitation to 
descend suddenly upon the city of 
Washington, our Capitol, would be 
covered to a depth of about thirty-nine 
miles. And the city of New York would 
be snowed under to a depth of about 
eight and two-thirds miles. If all of 
this snowfall were concrete, it would 
make a road fifty feet wide and one 
foot thick, extending, approximately, 
one and one-half billion miles. Or all 
this concrete would build a solid tower, 
