So much snow in the road.

March 5 

Snowed an inch or two in the night. Went to Carlisle, surveying. 

It is very hard turning out, there is so much snow in the road. Your horse springs and flounders in it. 

The snow in the wood-lot which I measured was about two feet on a level.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 5, 1856

There is so much snow in the road . . . about two feet on a level. See February 12, 1856 ("Twenty-five days the snow was sixteen inches deep in open land!!”); February 19, 1856 ("The snow has been deeper since the 17th than before this winter . . . seventeen or eighteen inches deep on a level.”); March 27, 1856 ("People do not remember when there was so much old snow on the ground at this date.”); March 30, 1856 ("Snow . . . has covered the ground since Christmas and stretches as far as you can see on every side . . . The Corner road is impassable to horses, because of their slumping in the old snow.”); April 10, 1856 ("We may now say that the ground is bare, though we still see a few patches or banks of snow on the hillsides at a distance . . . Thus does this remarkable winter disappear at last.") See also Donald Sutherland, The Long, Hard Winter of 1855-56 ("The Winter of 1855-56 was the coldest winter of the 1850s.")

Two feet in the wood-

lot and so much in the road 

that your horse flounders.