Notch-town numbers
The drift, engineered
Services & rates
The winter rate card
Per running foot, set and rated — the 60-inch post depth and the gust-rated bracing are inside every line, because January is the wrong month to learn what a shortcut costs.
Engineered drift fence, 6 ftfrom $38/ln ft
slatted snow fence on steel posts
Solid windbreak, 8 ftfrom $52/ln ft
the yard-and-barn shield
Livestock shelterlinefrom $27/ln ft
the paddock windbreak
Driveway gate, winter-ratedfrom $1,900
snow-load hinges, Grade-2 hardware
Evergreen screen & bermfrom $9.40/ft
the living windbreak, planted
Spring strike & re-setfrom $3.20/ft
seasonal lines, down and back up
Setback read from photographs
We lay eighteen winters of drift shots over your parcel before a post moves. The drift already knows where it wants to sit; the line’s job is to agree with it — upwind of everything you are protecting.
Rated, not hoped
The gust number is printed on the sheet, and post gauge, brace spacing and slat pattern all follow it. A windbreak that folds in the first ice storm is a fence that charged you twice.
The March re-set
Seasonal lines come down, get checked over, and go back up square — same crew, same number, before the mud. Perennial lines get a spring walk free for as long as they stand.
Brackett Notch · Cold Hollow · 2024–2026
Lines that met the drift
Photographed the winter after they went in, which is the only photograph a snow fence respects. Ask at the drift read and we will show you the same yards in March.
The ground truth
How a drift line goes in
A snow fence is not a wall — it is an argument with the wind about where to drop its load. The argument is won with setback arithmetic and post depth, in that order, and both are on the sheet before we dig.
The drift read
Photographs of your parcel across eighteen winters, the prevailing wind rose, and a walk to where last year’s drift actually sat. The line is drawn where the snow wants to stop anyway.
Layout & setback
The setback arithmetic that puts the drift upwind of what matters — drive, barn, lane — with room for the year the snow comes sideways for a week.
Set below frost
Sixty-inch holes through the mountain frost line, posts in concrete, braces on the sheet. The notch freezes deeper than the county map admits, so we dig to the notch, not the map.
Slat, brace, rate
Slatted rows to break the wind’s grip, bracing to the printed gust number, gates hung on snow-load hinges — then we photograph the first real storm for your file.
The plough driver stopped in the road the first winter and asked what we had changed. Nothing, except the snow now lands in a line at the top of the field instead of a bank on the porch — thirty feet of drift that used to be shovelling, gone for thirty-eight dollars a foot.
Fourteen winters here and the school drive drifted over every single one of them. The year after Whiteout set the line, it drifted over exactly none — and the lit posts mean the 4 a.m. run to the bus is a road instead of a guess.
They showed us photographs of our own field from before we owned it, traced where the drift had always wanted to sit, and set the line there. It felt like cheating. The gust rating on the sheet felt even better in the December the barn roof went.
The livestock line paid for itself the first February — the paddock windbreak cut the feed bill and the standing water both, and the March re-set crew came when the calendar said, not when the mud allowed. Same hands both ends.
Before the ground locks
Asked over the counter, in November
The four questions every notch yard asks while the coffee pours — answered with the same sheet the crew builds from.
What is a snow fence actually doing?
It slows the wind below the speed at which it can carry snow, so the load drops out upwind — in a controlled line instead of wherever the gust dies. A properly set line keeps the majority of a drift off whatever sits downwind of it, which is arithmetic, not luck.
How tall, and how far from the driveway?
Six feet of fence manages a drift footprint many times its height downwind, so the setback is the real design decision — close enough to be effective, far enough that the drift it plants is nobody’s problem. We set it off your parcel’s photographs, not a rule of thumb from a flat county.
Will it take an ice-storm gust?
The sheet says 110 mph design gust and the build follows the sheet — post gauge, brace spacing and slat pattern are all downstream of that number. We have lost exactly zero lines to weather since the rating went on paper.
Can we take it down for summer?
That is the seasonal line — struck in spring, checked over, re-set before first frost, and re-rated each autumn. The re-set is a standing date with the same crew, and the number is on the rate card, not negotiated in a snowbank.
Drift reads before ground-lock, free · Brackett Notch, Cold Hollow and the notch roads · (555) 213-7740 · snow@whiteoutfence.example
Read your drift before it lands.
One free walk with the photograph archive, a rated line on a sheet you keep, and a set date before the ground locks. November is late; October is comfortable.