The snow is slowly melting, receding day by day, freezing again by night, turning into slush in the afternoons in the places where we walk. The three feet of neat snow, sometimes speckled with spruce needles, has collapsed on itself into ice gravel, no longer neat, and sprinkled with flecks of dirt.
Sofia's circle of ice and snow, where she had dug a nice ice moat at the end of where her chain reached, is only about ten feet across now, and there is space under her doghouse, too, instead of packed snow. She has been discovering sticks and bones and toys that she stashed there last fall and greets me with them joyously each time I come to get her.
Her ice moat is now a mud moat, and the frozen berms behind her doghouse have melted completely away, revealing the legendary Shoals of Shit, a semi-circle of solid shit.
It isn't that we are so lazy that we don't pick up the dog poop all winter. It's not that at all. We'd do it, if it were possible. But I ask you, have you ever tried to pry frozen poop out of snow and ice at 20 below zero? I think not! (For another thing, it's a miracle that dogs can poop at all out there at that temperature. I know that I sure can't!) There are extreme Forces of Nature at work here, not to mention that it would take specialized equipment to FIND the poop in the first place, as it is covered in lovely white snow.
Oh, and remember, there are only about two hours of light per day during winter, which makes finding things rather a problem.
First you'd need something along the lines of a Poop Dectector in order to find what you are looking for. I've seen the dogs looking for a place to poop in the winter time, and their own buil-in Poop Detectors don't work very well at 20 below, either. They walk around and around, circle, sniff, circle, sniff, and repeat. Sofia has a new twist to it: she pounces on the snow, digs a little, dashes back and forth and pounces again, digs a little more, and keeps doing this until she's satisfied that she has discovered a bonified Pooping Place. If a dog has trouble finding the Pooping Place, I don't think we'd stand a chance without specialized and scientific equipment. I don't know how it would work, but a Poop Detector would be necessary, since you can't remove poop if you can't find it. It would look like a metal detector, I suppose. You'd have to adjust it to ignore Moose Nuggets, though.
Once the poop is found, it needs to be removed, and since it has bonded with the ground and snow and ice on a molecular level, I think a heated shovel would be in order. However, since you are going to heat the shovel, why not just put a blow torch at the end of the shovel? In fact, forget the shovel. If I have a blow torch, there's only one thing I want to do with it, and that's burn stuff up!
So forget shoveling! Just get your handy, dandy Shit Incinerator™ and once you've determined where the lode of poo is, crank it to high and burn it right there! Of course be very careful not to burn up the doghouse, or any of the trees, though in the winter in Alaska it's pretty much impossible to start a forest fire. I wouldn't use it if the dogs have been pooping right next to the cabin, either.