Not a lot of regular work got done today after campus was shut down at 10 a.m., but there was still plenty of work to do. Really, a snow day is pretty much the happiest crisis to report about, but it still meant a few dozen hurried phone calls, a few frightening near-slips with camera gear, and a few hours of numb fingers and even colder feet.
In the course of all this, one question kept coming up: When was the WSU campus last closed due to snow?
As far as we could tell, no one really knew for certain. People remembered Mount St. Helens for sure in 1980, and there was something about closure in 1996 due to weather, but it wasn't snow. I'll be trying to track down the answer more definitively by Monday, but I was able to find out that the last confirmed snow days were Jan. 4 and 5, 1982. It was the beginning of spring semester and students weren't able to travel back to Pullman. Those two days had to be made up the following two Saturdays, a plan that obviously didn't earn many fans among the student body.
So that's the history bit. But today was more about now, a little bit of community Zen as everyone dropped regular schedules and did whatever seemed fun. For us, fun meant documenting what everyone else was doing.
Fortunately, the university handed us a second chance. With Friday classes cancelled as well, the Evergreen staff will take a break from reporting (maybe) and enjoy the day more like normal people.
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