This West Chester, Pa. man was tired of winter. Then he invented Snowmelt Derby

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It’s like watching paint dry, only colder.

For more than a decade, dozens of people have tracked the slow retreat of snow across Bob Mina’s backyard in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Each minute that the icy crystals persist against the sun, warming air or rain could mean the difference between eternal bragging rights and a batch of homemade cookies —  or stinging defeat.

The game is called Snowmelt Derby. Mina, an information technology professional, runs it each winter among his friends on Facebook, who guess when the last snow in his yard will melt for the season.

“It’s mindless. It’s pointless. It involves no skills,” Mina said. “It’s just fun. And by the time it’s over, we’re almost to spring. It’s the ultimate timekiller.”

More than 100 players, some as far away as Australia, England and Canada, are currently waiting to see whether this weekend’s warm weather will wipe away several inches of snow blanketing Mina’s backyard.

How Snowmelt Derby works

The rules of Snowmelt Derby are simple: when snow falls in Bob Mina’s backyard, he posts about it on Facebook. His friends tell him the date and time they think all of the snow will disappear. The closest person, without the snow lasting longer than their guess, wins.

“If you say the snow is going to last until Feb, 15 at 12:04 p.m., you’re on the clock until 12:04 p.m.,” Mina said. “At 12:05, your time is past. You’re off. Whoever is next in line takes over.”

Mina keeps a spreadsheet of all of the guesses. This year, they stretch until July 4. Mina posts regular photo updates on Facebook, tagging contestants as their times approach, and they’re knocked out of the game.

Mina only counts “natural” snow accumulation. He avoids walking on the fallen snow in his backyard for the duration of the game, and does not count any piles from plowing or shovelling.

Mina’s backyard gets very little sun due to a row of pines and other trees along the southern and western edges. This means snow can hang on surprisingly long, he said.

“It looks like it’s going to last forever,” Mina said, surveying a thick layer of snow Thursday. “It always does, but there have been plenty of times where one warm-up, one heavy rainstorm can wipe out 90% of it, and suddenly you’re playing for that last little bit in the garden, in the flower pots, in the shadows.”

The competition doesn’t end until the last crystals of snow have liquified.

“I have to get out there with my cell phone and sometimes zoom in and go, ‘Yep … there’s snow between those blades of grass,” he said.

The winner of Snowmelt Derby gets a batch of homemade Toll House cookies delivered or mailed to them.

‘Mother Nature bats last’ in a totally unpredictable game

Philadelphia resident Tommy Leonardi, a friend of Mina’s through dragon boat racing, has been playing Snowmelt Derby for more than a decade. He’s never won, but has come “incredibly close” several times, he said.

One year, the snow in Mina’s backyard had shrunk to the size of a golfball on the day Leonardi had guessed it would melt.

“I was going out … every hour at like 9 o’ clock [p.m.], 10 o’ clock, 11 o’ clock, and the snow was still hanging in,” Mina remembered.

A snowstorm loomed in the forecast. By midnight, only a patch of snow the size of a teaspoon remained, Leonardi recalled.

Mina said he went out to his backyard with a flashlight and started to livestream the snow melt action to his friends on Facebook.

“I turned the flashlight on, and the snow was falling,” Mina said. “’The game goes on,’” he remembers telling his viewers.

“It was a crushing defeat in livestream,” Leonardi said.

Leonardi, president of the United States Dragon Boat Federation, is a self-described “competitive person” who dreamed of being a meteorologist when he was a kid. He analyzes not only temperature forecasts to craft his Snowmelt Derby guesses, but also wind and dewpoint. He said sublimation, or when ice skips the liquid phase and turns straight into gas, can be a real factor.

But nerding out on weather projections will only get you so far. Snowmelt Derby is fundamentally a game of chance, Mina said.

“I love the absolute lack of predictability,” Mina said. “Do we have any idea what the weather’s going to be like in March? I mean, sure — you can look at the long-range stuff. But Mother Nature bats last.”

Mina’s former coworker, Kathy Burke-Howe, is Snowmelt Derby’s only two-time champion. While the West Chester resident does consult weather forecasts, she often makes her guesses based on her favorite number, 11, or dates that are significant to her family.

This year, she’s hoping the snow will hold on until 11:11 a.m on March 11 — her birthday.

A welcome ‘distraction from the real world’

Mina created the Snowmelt Derby while feeling cooped up during a particularly cold March in 2014. He was training to try out for the U.S. national dragon boat team but was unable to paddle on the Schuylkill because the river was frozen. Instead, Mina trained on a paddle erg in his basement.

“This felt like, at that point, it was going to last forever,” he said. “So it just was like, well, let’s try and make the most of it, because by the time the snow melts, then … we’re back on the water, and everything is good.”

Now, Mina sees the competition as a way to bring positivity to his friends’ Facebook feeds. He said it’s something that “can’t possibly be made political, can’t possibly be turned into something rancorous or debatable.”

“I guess I’m just trying to generate a distraction from the real world,” he said.

“If they can open Facebook and instead of being fed bad news and dour-faced predictions and articles meant to antagonize, but rather, how’s the snow doing? … When’s it going to melt? Even those few minutes, it’s just an escape,” he added.

Snowmelt Derby players do seem to find a joyful escape in Mina’s updates. Leonardi describes Mina’s posts as “absolutely hilarious.”

“It makes me wonder how he comes up with some of these humorous lines,” Leonardi said. “Plus, he always has photos of the latest amount of snow in his yard, and usually includes some funny photo that he finds of his cat or some random thing in his yard. …. There’s always some entertainment value in it, and we just keep coming back, and it keeps growing.”

Burke-Howe said Mina’s witty posts are the main reason she plays year after year. She describes the prize cookies, which she’s had the unique honor of tasting twice, as merely “fine.”

“We all struggle with challenges in life,” Burke-Howe said. “Having Bob Mina in your Facebook [feed] makes it all a little bit easier.”