SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — Crews in Sioux Falls have been hard at work the past few months clearing snow-logged streets, gutters, city lots and more.

Once the plows go through, clearing lanes for drivers to get to-and-fro, the focus turns to collecting all the snow that was pushed aside.

This is done street by street, truckload by truckload, and all that snow is hauled to a few locations throughout the city and piled into growing mountains of snow.

Daniel Whipple, a Street Maintenance Supervisor for the city, told KELOLAND News on Monday that in a typical winter season, they usually haul somewhere in the range of less than 6,000 – 7,000 truckloads of snow. This year, he says they’ve hauled around 25,000.

Breaking this down, Whipple told KELOLAND News the city had hauled approximately 15,221 large side-dump trailers full of snow and 9,984 smaller end-dump loads.

Out at the snow piles near 12th Street and Lyon Blvd. on Monday, the past few weeks of thawing, freezing and fresh snow has left pools of water, moats of slush and ridges of snow that make traversing the area challenging.

Working through the mess and around the piles, we were able to get a sense of the scale of the piles themselves, which is difficult to convey through photos or video. To help with getting an idea of the amount of snow hauled, we asked Whipple for an approximation of the total volume of snow hauled so far.

With the nearly 25K loads hauled, Whipple said this constitutes about 405K cubic yards of snow. For perspective, this is enough volume to fill more than 122 Olympic-sized swimming pools.