For readers who don’t know, North Dakota is very sparsely populated. The entire state has less than 800,000 people. In the southwest corner of North Dakota, the largest city is Dickinson, with 25,000 people. Surrounding Dickinson are more than a dozen towns with populations ranging from 30 to 1,000 people: South Heart, Belfield, New Hradec, Manning, Killdeer, Gladstone, Richardton, Taylor, Lefor, Regent, Mott, Hettinger, Reeder, Scranton, Amidon, New England.

Taking New England, North Dakota for example, with a population of 500 people, I think that the vast majority of people in the United States can’t imagine how quiet, uneventful, slow-paced life is. What makes it even more quiet, is when a winter storm causes people to stay home. Traffic goes from a normal daytime rate of one vehicle driving past a house every ten minutes, to one vehicle per hour.

At night during a winter snow storm, once it gets past about 8:00 p.m., everyone in New England is home for good. No traffic at all after that, maybe not even until 10:00 a.m. the following day.

On Monday evening December 12, there began a winter snow storm in southwest North Dakota, that was expected to be just short of a blizzard. The winds would be just below 35 mph, and visibility would be slightly above 1/2 mile. On Tuesday there was about 12″ of snow fall. After staying inside all day Tuesday, out of boredom I got up at 3:00 a.m. Wednesday morning to make some videos showing how still it was outside. Here are some of these videos: