At least that’s the way it felt this winter on the Seven Mile Beach. With some help from Avalon’s official meteorologist, Joe Martucci, we’ve been able to determine the following:

The closest snow totals for a barrier island for this winter that we were able to collect was from Ocean City — and even these numbers aren’t official, but OC reported 24.1 inches of the white stuff, as opposed to an inland locale such as Lower Township, which reported 16.7 inches. As a point of reference, we can usually expect an average of 14.1 inches. So yes, that was a lot of snow.

What probably made it seem like even more was the snowpack – the length of time that snow remained on the ground. Typically, the Seven Mile Beach does a pretty good job of clearing fallen snow from hard surfaces quickly on its own, thanks to its moderating ocean temperatures and salt air. This year, the especially prolonged spell of extra-cold temperatures meant that we had snowpack on the ground longer than at any time since the winter of 1978.

Even the bay, which doesn’t normally freeze over, reacted to the cold. Princeton Harbor in Avalon was frozen from side to side for the first time since the winter of 1977. Ouch! That’s cold.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout-out to the public works departments in both Avalon and Stone Harbor, who did an exceptional job of clearing our local streets — and even pitched in on county roads that run through the island.