What Winter Does to Playgrounds

We recently received some winter photos of a playground we designed for Eccles Elementary School in Cordova, Alaska (images from Gary Max of Gametime). This has been an extraordinary year for Cordova for the amount of snow they have received, and it gives new meaning to 'northern design'. Play structures develop new ways to be used, and snow becomes one of the best parts of the playground. They appear to be cutting the snow into chunks to remove it from the portion of the playground that is over the new school gym. What great building blocks!

The two photos to below show what the playground looks like when it doesn't have so much snow (images from Corey Wall of MRV Architects).

BEFORE the big snows... the roof of the new gym.

BEFORE the big snows.

NOW... the images AFTER the big snows:

Swings, a tilted sky-runner, and an exercise station
to the right. All mostly buried.

A close-up of the 'tilted sky-runner'... grounded.

This is where all of the chunks of snow are coming from...
the roof above the gym. See the photo at the top of this post
to see what this area normally looks like.

Spreading the chunks of snow from the roof out over the
playground. I hope someone sends us a photo of how the kids
used these when they discovered them on school day!

Shoveling the roof of a covered play area.

I wonder about the safety of moving the swing seat
up so high you could whack your head on the top bar.

February 29, 2012 update:
We received some more photos from Rochelle van den Broek in Cordova. As we suspected, the kids did get crafty with those snow blocks and created their own igloo.

Getting crafty with snow blocks... igloo style.