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For the love of snow: How Aggies survive the icy campus

Snow comes with the territory at Utah State University. Aggies understand that once it comes, it’s usually here to stay for a while. Depending on your attitude, that might be a really good or a really bad thing. Here are a few thoughts from students on how they feel about all the white stuff hanging around on campus.

The girl on crutches

Bethany Heywood had knee surgery over Christmas break. The senior in public relations tore her anterior crucial ligament and meniscus playing intramural soccer over the summer. She was ordered to be on crutches for five weeks.

“It’s been really fun chugging around in the snow,” said Heywood, who has two weeks left on crutches.

She lives down the hill at Aggie Flats and has difficulty getting to class.

“Where I live it gets super icy. The other day when we had the fog, there was like a centimeter of ice in our parking lot,” Heywood said. “I’m pretty sure I slipped like four times, but I caught myself.”

She appreciates when people put rock salt down so she doesn’t slip. Heywood loves it when a kind person opens a door for her. Usually, she tries to pop it open with her crutch really fast and hurry through.

“I have a new sympathy for people who have to have crutches because it’s awful,” Heywood said. “Today I was in a building that had stairs and this girl had crutches. She was crying going down the stairs. I felt so bad.”

The walker from California

Maddy Gilleland isn’t from snow country. The journalism sophomore is from Newport Beach, California. She came to Utah for a change of scenery and to be in the mountains.

“I don’t see snow a lot. I actually love the snow; I think it’s beautiful,” Gilleland said.

She lives at Aggie Factory and takes a bus to campus. She admits she doesn’t like it when the sidewalks aren’t well-shoveled as she tries to get from class to class.

Gilleland recently had an experience with some ice outside of the Agricultural Sciences building.

“It was like you couldn’t even see the ice; it just came out of literally nowhere. I was looking at my phone and I almost fell. Basically, I don’t know how it happened. I should have fallen, but I just caught myself and kept walking,” Gilleland said.

Thankfully she didn’t fall and there were not a lot of people around to witness her bumble.

“The boys behind me probably saw,” Gilleland said. “(I was) Definitely embarrassed, but everyone falls on the ice, right?”

The biker from the Island

Emmalee Olsen lives on the Island. She is a sophomore in landscape architecture and originally from Billings, Montana. She is used to snow and big hills, so most days she rides her bike to school and work.

“I usually just take it up Old Main. I mean it’s painful any way you go, so I just take the fastest way,” Olsen said.

While some students push through the pain all the way to the top of the hill, Olsen has a different method.

“I don’t usually ride all the way to the top. I’m not in that good of shape, so I ride it for a while then I’m like, ‘No, this is a good place to start walking,’” Olsen said.

She rides back home along the highway on a different route rather than taking on the downhill slope of Old Main. Olsen says it’s less steep and she has a lesser chance of dying from ice on a steep sidewalk.

But slippery sidewalks aren’t the only thing to pose a death threat for Olsen. After it snows, cars and bikes sometimes don’t share the road very well.

“One day I was riding to work and it had snowed a little bit, nothing crazy. But this car was backing up and didn’t see me through the snow, so I got hit by a car on my bike,” Olsen said. “They were just backing out of their driveway so they weren’t going really fast or anything.”

Olsen does have to replace the rim on her bike now, but luckily she didn’t suffer any major injures. She has since learned how to handle riding her bike around cars in the snow.

“If they can’t see you, then you can get hit … as we’ve seen,” she said.