You know the story that the Inuit have 100 words for snow? It's kind of a cliche and not exactly true, but you know who needs 100 words for snow? Cyclists.
I thought about that today as I made my way over and through a vast variety of kinds of snow today on my way back from the office in a storm bad enough that I left at noon hoping to avoid worse. I've said before that whatever it's doing outside, I've ridden in worse but today. . . today came close. There was a couple of centimetres down on top of poorly cleared streets from the last snowfall, fine icy flakes falling and being blown into my face by the wind, and it started snowing around 10 am and it was now 12:30 or 1:00. Not enough time for the plows to really get going or keep up.
We have one word other than "snow, with description of the situation" for winter cycling: snirt. Snirt is a portmanteau of "snow" and "dirt" and that's what it is: snow with dirt on it or in it. Mostly, in the city, it's that filthy stuff that piles up at the edge of the road, full of grit and salt and grime. It can alse be what you get on a moutain bike track where snow and dirt get churned up.
Mountaineers get a few more words for snow and ice (cornice, spindrift, verglas, bergschrund). Maybe skiers do too. But bikers need to step it up.
Stuff we need a word for:
Snow that has been compacted by car tires on an unplowed street, so that where the tire has passed it's got this weird, variable consistency that causes it to sometimes suddenly yank your front tire out of line. You can usually ride just to one side or the other of where the tire has passed with no trouble: but as soon as you hit snow that's been driven over like this, you're swearing and wrestling your handlebars. You have to watch for this snow: it looks a lot like the other kind of tire-tread snow, which is fine to ride in, and it's often found in streaks and patches alongside it.
The other kind of tire-tread snow: where the car tire has gone over and left the snow chopped up so that it's less dense than the snow beside it. This makes the tire tread a little easier to ride in than the surrounding texture.
The 1-cm pared-down snow left behind by a higher plow blade (usually found on smaller side streets with a "standard of maintenance" that involves not clearing to bare pavement). Dubious. Less easy to read than the car-tread types, mostly straightforward but also not completely trustworthy.
The stuff left behind that falls back into the road or is not quite picked up by the plow: this lies in patches in the bike travel area and can be either "slush, ride through it" or "Contains Chunks." Generally temperature and the weather of the last few days will help you figure that out. It is a problem deciding which of the two it is as you're riding toward a chunk of it and a driver is passing you with no room to swing out around it though.
Drifted snow. For some reason unknown to me, drifted snow is more touchy to ride in than fallen snow. It will yank your tires.
The snow that has been dragged out at an intersection by a plow and left across the bike lane/edge of the road. Either in an arc across the bike space as the plow turned onto the main street, or across the whole intersection.
The oblong ridges of snow left by parked cars that didn't move for the plow so that now the whole lane has a phantom parked car in it.
Swooshy snow and sludgy snow: these are both newly fallen, unplowed snow, but one of them is quiet and fluffy and muffles everything and is easy to get through: the other is the same depth but drags at your tires. I think the difference is temperature and maybe crystal structure.
Very cold snow that has been leveled by a plow or warmed and then frozen to a harder consistency: this stuff is often hard enough to ride on with no trouble. A delight.
