A pickup truck buried in snow was revealed by the Iowa Department of Transportation’s snow plow.
(Iowa Department of Transportation)
When Bruce Springsteen wrote the lines, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back,” for his 1982 album “Nebraska,” is it possible that he was thinking of a pickup truck buried in a blizzard just one state over in Iowa?
Well, no, I don’t think so. But for some reason, those are the lines that jumped in my head when I saw this picture from Iowa’s Department of Transportation last year.
During the five long years I lived in Iowa, I learned a little about the way a heavy winter snow can make things disappear.
When a blizzard hits, any small object in your yard is at risk of disappearing entirely within the white drifts. It could be a hand trowel in a garden or an ashtray on a porch. Once they’re buried, it’s easy to forget they were ever even there.
One of the strange and beautiful moments of spring is when those objects come back to life, suddenly revealed and returned from the melting snow.
On March 10, 2025, a snow plow on Iowa’s State Highway 141 revealed the largest of these sort of buried winter objects that I’ve ever seen: an entire pickup truck hidden deep in the snow. After a winter of heavy snow, it had been abandoned by the owner, but, as Springsteen wrote, “everything that dies someday comes back.”
Winter Storm Lola didn’t wring out much snow, by Hawkeye State standards. Only 4 inches of snowfall was recorded in Denison, Iowa, near where the buried pickup truck was found.
But wind gusts up to 63 mph blew the snow into large drifts, especially in outlying areas. Five days after the storm, the buried pickup was found.
As we head into spring, objects will be coming back to many people that were lost in this winter’s heavy snows.
What’s the largest object you’ve ever found buried in winter snow? Tell us about it in the comments.