If deep snow has fallen around your house, you might as well throw caution to the wind and go swimming. Put on your swimming suit, dive into a snow drift and swim hard — freestyle, backstroke or even butterfly. More than a few crazy people have done it.
With all the fresh snow we’ve had the past few days in the Puget Sound region, I thought I could find some fresh videos of the so-called snow swimming challenge. My search came up empty, but if anyone knows of any new videos — or if you make a new one yourself — feel free to share the link.
The first video on this page, posted Jan. 19, shows the basics of the sport in its simplest form. Nicole, who posted the video, is a competitive high school swimmer in Ohio, as one can see from her other videos.
One of the best compilation videos was put together two years ago and posted by Swirly Pancake Films. That’s the second video. Some of these video clips were captured several years ago, but I think they’re still amusing.
The third video, posted in January, shows Andri Ragetti, a Swiss freestyle skier who is shown attacking the snow in an entirely new way. Ragetti accomplished an “epic 2018 campaign,” landing on the podium in six out of six World Cup competitions, according to his biography for the X Games. He was the first skier ever to land back-to-back triples in a slopestyle competition (Aspen 2016) and the first to land a quad cork 1800 (South Tyrol, Italy, 2017).
The last video is a vlog by Sierra, who begins the video with a commitment to go for a swim in the snow. Her discussion is amusing, as she spends most of the next three minutes talking herself into it and then later regretting it.
“You may be wondering, what made you want to jump in a cold, really cold, disgusting cold pile of snow?” she ponders. “I don’t know what to tell you. I just looked out the window, and it’s like, that’s it; I’m gonna make the jump; I’m gonna do it.”
The question is, did she ever really swim in the snow, as the video title suggests?
