Following a less than snow-filled winter season, the annual Leelanau Enterprise snowfall contest came to a close on Tuesday, with the first place winner announced as Bruce Wallis of Suttons Bay. Wallis guessed 60 inches for the total snowfall in the 2023-24 winter season, and will receive a $200 prize.
The closest entries out of the 468 that submitted were both two inches off the final snowfall total of 62 inches, so a tie breaker was determined based on the total points scored in the 2024 NCAA Men’s Championship basketball game. Those who came in second, third and fourth place will receive different cash prizes and awards, too.
Wallis said his father happened to also be a meteorologist at a weather station in Sault Ste. Marie when he was a kid. Winning was not only a pleasant surprise that he didn’t expect, but a coincidence considering that his father was very much a weather person.
“I grew up listening to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) because my father worked for NOAA and even for the National Weather Service in Sault Ste. Marie,” Wallis said. “I always say I didn’t learn nearly as much as he could have taught me… but growing up around it, I feel like I acquired some knowledge by osmosis. He taught us (and brothers) all that stuff, and he used to bring those little teletype weather maps home and we would color them.” When informed that his NCAA Men’s Championship Basketball Game total points guess of 136 was just one point off from the total of 135, Wallis was just as pleasantly surprised.
“Are you kidding?! I’m usually in a March Madness pool and I didn’t even get into a pool this year,” Wallis said.
Wallis writes a monthly column called “Cooking from Memory” for the Traverse City Record Eagle using the knowledge he’s gained from when he was a chef and memories from past years. He said he usually tells a story and wedges in a relevant recipe into his pieces, but with both his mother and father in assisted living now, has been incorporating more remembrances from his childhood memories with his parents. Wallis said after winning the Enterprise snowfall contest though, he may just call them to talk about the unexpected win for a future column.
Snowfall in the region this season has been unusually low, and follows one of the warmest December and February months on record due to El Nino according to the National Weather Service. By April of last year, there was already a total of 113 inches of snow recorded in the area. This year, that 62 inches of snowfall saw a significant drop of more than half from the 2023 total.
Wallis said growing up in Sault Ste. Marie and moving from Duluth, Minnesota, he and his wife were used to the conditions of living near Lake Superior and experiencing the colder weather with lots of snow. Their first winter living in Suttons Bay seven years ago made for cold enough weather that the lake froze over clear and they shoveled out a big ice rink on the bay to ice skate. While temperatures and snowfall isn’t what it was years ago, Wallis said he hopes it cycles back to colder winters.
