Some places on the East Coast had 8 foot high snow drifts

I was thinking more about this after I heard this fact. Usually to have a snow drift this high from blowing winds during a blizzard you need at least 30 inches of snow or more. However, this was true many many places that got from 30 to 40 inches of snow. So, that much of a drift would bury a car or pickup truck completely where you might not even see where it is anymore. So, I was wondering how many people lost where they had parked their cars and trucks? (for at least a day or two) until the snow began to melt.

I had an experience in 1970 the night 2 friends and I almost froze to death in an emergency Snow Cave on Mt. Shasta. When we finally made it back down to my VW Bug we not only couldn't find the road (until we dug down through it with our snow shoes to make sure it was actually the road, we almost couldn't find my car either because the only reason we knew it was there was 2 or 3 inches of the radio aerial sticking above the new fallen snow.

When we had arrived before we accidentally got caught in a white out, the road was plowed and paved up to around 7000 feet at Bunny Flats. So, we put on our snow shoes for "What we thought would be a short trek to Horse Camp". However, we didn't anticipate either 5 feet of powder snow coming down that night or the white out we would face. Since there were no cell phones or GPS devices then we almost died and would have if one of us didn't know how to build a snow cave in this situation. In a snow cave you can have temperatures up to 50 degrees before the interior snow starts to melt and make pools of water inside. We didn't have a candle then but that is the best way to stay warm (you warm your hands with the candle inside the snow cave) and the candle doesn't give off enough heat to start melting the cave and causing you problems. However, you want to make sure you have enough air to breathe through the night as often snow coming down is going to seal off the cave during the night. In fact, I started to panic a little when I dug us out the next morning because the entrance was now covered in at least 3 to 5 feet of new powder beyond where I dug it the night before. So, trying to find the surface of the snow was a little scary. Because in my mind I had imagined that the entry point was still the entry point but it no longer was because up to 5 feet of new powder had fallen during the night. Luckily, the cave didn't wind up being our grave as well.