The heaviest snow in this market and the emptiest houses sit on the same ground. Maple City, the closest long-record station, averages 142.1 inches a year, and Glen Arbor Township has about three seasonal homes for every household that lives there year-round.
Traverse City Snow Plowing is a referral service. What it offers a Glen Arbor owner is a match with an independent operator; the plow, the shovel, any roof work and the photos all come from that insured contractor, not from this site.
Glen Arbor has no station of its own, so its number is borrowed from Maple City 1E in the central Leelanau uplands, about 40% snowier than the airport in town. The township’s 916 year-round residents share it with about 1,659 housing units and 464 households; its own master plan put it as about three times more seasonal homes than year-round ones. Across the region a seasonal house is used about 86 days a year.
That combination is the whole case for a vacant-property contract: the ground that collects the most snow is where the fewest people are around to see it. The drive needs to be open for the propane truck, a home-watch visit, the furnace technician and emergency access — access is the point, not a morning commute. And the owner, somewhere downstate or out of state, needs a photo after every visit to know it happened. What a vacant-property contract should require →
That is the township’s 2018 master plan describing itself. A private road is plowed by whoever its owners arrange, and the Leelanau County Road Commission’s seasonal roads — 63 miles county-wide — get no winter maintenance from November through April. M-22 is a different matter: the road commission plows it, with M-72, under contract to MDOT.
A house at the end of an unplowed lane is not only unshoveled in February; its owner cannot drive in to check on it. Clearing that lane is a separate contract from the driveway, and on a shared road the neighbors may split it. Ask the road commission whether your road is designated seasonal; neither county publishes a list. How private and seasonal road plowing is arranged.
Ten to twelve inches of new snow weighs about 5 pounds per square foot; an inch of ice weighs about as much as a foot of fresh snow; many roofs show stress from around 20 psf. The 60 psf in the building code for Leelanau County is a design ground snow load, not the capacity of your roof, and older cottages may predate the current table. A house held at low heat forms fewer ice dams than an occupied one, but the snow load builds with nobody there to notice a sagging roofline or a stain on the ceiling.
What a contract can add is observation: a photo of the roofline taken from the ground on each visit, and a call to the owner when something looks wrong. Five of the eleven contractors on Leelanau County’s own snow-removal list offer roof snow removal, and that is work for an insured roof-snow contractor, never for the owner on a ladder. Roof snow and ice dams, observed from the ground.
Glen Arbor Township’s ordinance has no rental provisions, and no township snow ordinance surfaced in this site’s research. State law still applies: MCL 257.677a bars putting driveway snow on a road or piling it so it blocks the view of a driver pulling out, with a civil fine up to $100. On heat, Michigan’s insurance department advises keeping the house at least 55 °F or having the water shut off and drained by a professional. Many policies exclude freeze damage unless one of those was done; read yours. Rules across the market.
Give the road name, whether it is private or seasonal, and who should hear first if the contractor sees trouble.
Call (231) 715-4148 Get a Season Price
Traverse City