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Anne Spiller is older than “sin,” she tells me. And being older than sin and being in Edmonton means that she has seen a lot of winters, and the one she is currently experiencing, that keeps walloping the Prairie capital with one snow dump after the next is, she assures me, nothing special.

“I don’t get why people are making such a fuss over it,” Ms. Spiller says. “We used to make snow caves when I was a little girl and the snowdrifts were as high as the houses.

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“This winter hasn’t been much to me. I actually find it to be rather mild.”

Which is Ms. Spiller’s polite way of informing a Toronto-based writer, a city forever lampooned countrywide for calling out the army when the snowy-going got a little too tough for us mega-city folk, that Edmonton’s Snow Dirt Mountain deserves little more than a shrug.

“I’ve seen the pictures of it,” Ms. Spiller says. “But I don’t see that it is anything exceptional.”

Snow Dirt Mountain is a man-made, ever-growing mound of the snow and grime that city workers have been hauling from city streets since November. There are five different storage sites, and this one, in the city’s west end, is the most prominent, achieving a measure of celebrity in the local newspapers. It is reportedly 200-feet high and getting bigger all the time.