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I just emailed a friend this question in complete seriousness:
How many miles do you think is vaguely plausible for people to think they can walk in a blizzard if they have supernatural resiliency and can also turn into snow leopards?
How many miles do you think is vaguely plausible for people to think they can walk in a blizzard if they have supernatural resiliency and can also turn into snow leopards?
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The other factor is that due to complicated magical issues, while they can turn into snow leopards, they can only navigate while in human form.
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It makes sense for them to spend as much of the trip as possible in snow leopard form, better adaption to heat loss and the ability to walk on snow rather than through snow. https://www.snowleopard.org/snow-leopard-facts/habitat/ says snow leopards will travel long distances and that one was tracked over 27 miles in a single night, but that was open desert.
snowleopardconservancy.org/ also looks like it might have useful data.
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(JUSTIN YESSS)
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"It's windy and snowing", well, the larger the better if you're trying to ignore that kind of weather; moose will sometimes ignore weather that sends all the deer into shelter, for example.
But a true, "I can't see, and the wind chill is going to kill me in a time measured in at best three-digits seconds" blizzard, you get into shelter and you stay there. If the supernatural resiliency involves simply not freezing to death no matter what, they still can't navigate.
If they don't realize they can't navigate, well, they'll figure it out pretty quick.
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(They have magical navigation.)
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(and time is distance, and you more or less get to pick what fraction of their regular rate of advance they're able to apply.)
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I might be going after why they think it's a good idea more than the raw distance; "I might have six hours before my infected wound goes systemic and there's this place which should have antibiotics four hours away..." sorts of logic.
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I had a friend once who collected resources on the uses of llamas in military logistics (USAn, I think) for a story they didn't even actually end up writing. :p
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If I'm being less reasonable, I am totally the kind of person who would research the hell out of the nearest real-world equivalent situations and waste extraordinary amounts of time speculating and adjusting variables and then not actually write the story.
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What I haven't seen mentioned is temperature and relative humidity.
It is possible to get to a point where it's too cold to snow -- what comes down is dry and powdery and has little ability to protect you from heat loss if you hunker down into it, unlike the thicker sorts of snow. When it's that cold (we're talking anywhere from -10 to -50, and yes I've been in -50), the air is crisp and generally clear, any wind blows around what's already there and doesn't tend to add to it. You have to keep moving your fingers and toes to avoid frostbite, even inside two layers of wool and the heaviest most insulated boots, and all exposed skin will frost over within minutes, which is not what you want. In those conditions, turn into a snow leopard, wrap that heavily insulated tail (with its fat deposits) around feet and face, find a snowbank behind a rock formation or other shelter, and stay there and endure. As a human, you're dead very fast otherwise.
If the temperature is above 0 F and it's snowing and if the people involved have suitable outdoor clothes for the weather, ones that cover all exposed skin -- snorkel hoods that heat their breath would be a plus -- they could probably walk a couple of miles -- depending on the wind speed and how slippery it is underfoot. You can lean against a wind while walking, but it's tiring; if you slip every time you put a foot down, it's too much work. It would take a lot of effort, regardless; they would be exhausted when they got to where they're going, and would need water first and then food, and somewhere to warm up that wouldn't be too fast (a hot bath on top of frostbite is intensely painful.)
It also matters a lot whether they are walking uphill, downhill, across ice, over rocks, etc.
Hope some of that is useful.
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When I was commuting from my mother's house to university, I used to walk ~2.5 miles in weather in the vicinity of 0 fahrenheit and sometimes very heavy snow (~20-30 feet visibility) wearing jeans, a winter coat, a hat and gloves and hiking boots. This was because I had to go to class or fail my classes in basically all weather conditions. (I did stay home when the weather hit negative fifteen plus because I didn't want to lose fingers or die. The university did not close, I had to email my teachers and ask permissionn.)
It wasn't what I would describe as pleasant, but I was capable of attending class afterward or going to cook dinner without collapsing or having to go thorugh an elaborate process of warming up my limbs; I never got frost bite. I am not superhuman or even particularly athletic. I just didn't have a driver's license.
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So I'd probably go with maybe 5-10 miles in a temperature around zero with visibility in the range of 10-20 feet? Far enough to feel like an impossible walk for a normal person under those conditions, not so far I'd be raising my eyebrows and going COME ON you are DEAD. This is extremely unscientific but as you note you just want handwave-able, so.
Are you interested in description points? I observe many of the other commentors have not walked in blizzards/been as stupid as me.
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(Yes, I'm going for difficult but not impossible. At least, not impossible up to the point where various problems and unexpected difficulties start adding up.)
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The most exhausting things about walking long distance are the wind and the ground conditions. The wind will fight you, even if it's not strong enough to actually knock you over. If you're walking into it you have to lean forward and fight like walking through jello or something; if it's blowing into your back you have to learn backward. This throws off your whole stride. It also makes tears come to your eyes, persistantly if you are unlucky like me, which can screw up your visibility.
The ground will be covered in a combination of snow, ice, and snow over ice. You have to walk slowly and steadily and kind of mincing - I can take fairly long strides because I have practice, but your weight has to go directly down and evenly onto each foot, if you try to walk normally your feet slide and you go down on the ground, and depending on what's under you getting up can be its own special battle. So you're slower and the actual strides are shorter than they would normally be. The combination of leaning into the wind and trying to keep your balance over snow means that your balance is very fragile. (Note that I have more experience walking over sidewalk for long distances; you have slightly more traction in the woods because of leaf cover/etc giving way under you, but it's also slippery by nature when wet, so it doesn't always help as much as you would hope. IME you feel more secure and move a little faster but are more likely to suddenly end up on your ass.)
If you don't walk in snow very regularly, also, your muscles won't be accustomed to the specific control you need to stop yourself from falling over, and so you'll start cramping up in your inner thighs and eventually calves, and it will get steadily worse over time; you can stop to rest but that makes you colder and is dangerous to do too much, which makes it worse than other exericse cramps. (This always is an issue for about the first few weeks of snowfall for me and then I get used to it.)
So it's very much an endurance thing. You keep your balance and you keep responding to the wind - this is mostly unconscious after a while - and you try very hard not to notice the fact that whatever bits of skin are not completely covered are aching and your eyes hurt and if it's cold enough the air in your lungs also hurts (it probably shouldn't be this cold if they're out for hours, though I would believe shifter healing can slow down less lethal degrees of frostbite.) If you notice any of those things fully, you might stop moving from exhaustion, and you know that you need to keep moving. Mostly you try to think about other things, and as you get more and more tired your mind kind of goes blank and you move on autopilot and it seems like this is the only place that has ever existed and then you stop thinking, and that's how people fall asleep in blizzards and die.
It's hard to talk much because you generally have to shout to be heard over the wind, and between exhaustion and effort you generally don't want to waste a ton of air doing that (though I have asthma so it's possible this hits other people less hard.) If the snow is thick enough to impede visibility, that really adds to the disorientation because, obviously, you can't see where you are - you're just kind of walking into a void, or maybe into a field of static on a television. This can make it profoundly boring, because you don't really have anything to look at to distract you from the discomfort.
I think that's everything occurring to me right now, unless one of them has an injury that might require crutches? I did a walking commute for a winter on forearm crutches! I can give advice about that too.
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If you don't walk in snow very regularly, also, your muscles won't be accustomed to the specific control you need to stop yourself from falling over, and so you'll start cramping up in your inner thighs and eventually calves
This is the best description I've ever seen on what it's like to walk in snow that's been partly compressed, and it explains why it's so tiring and slow. Walking in a fresh snowdrift that's just piles and piles of snow is one (very tiring) thing, but walking in snow that's been sitting around for a few days and had people tramping around on it, and has turned into a layer of slippery ice with a thin dusting of snow on top is annoying as hell because every step carries with it the possibility of slipping and falling painfully onto hard ice. This whole thread is reminding me why going outside and doing anything in the winter in New York (going to class, the grocery, anything that required walking outside) was such a pain in the ass.
P.S. Plus, the jolt of fright and adrenaline every time your foot slips adds to the overall tiringness.
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Oh, I forgot about how your legs get wet though! And capillary action takes it further up assuming you're not wearing snow pants, so the numb-pain feeling comes up your legs too.
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Musing on how I'd answer it if it were e. If they are estimating and are basically thinking human-but-utterly-(over)confident...Perhaps about the same amount that an ordinary athletic person can walk in a similar time frame NOT in a blizzard? There's no context on location or timing in what you described. I'm not very athletic, but I can and have done eight miles in an afternoon from one side of a city to another for the heck of it, just keeping moving without any particular speed, but in good weather.
Although even the supernaturally resilient might have trouble with getting LOST in white-out conditions. As a skier, even a clearly signed and groomed trail becomes hard to find with a bit of white stuff in the air... even with great eye sight and a good sense of direction and distance, all the markers get covered and confused!
On the other hand if they have experience, than whatever scientists say snow leopards do under those conditions!
Human limbs are gonna be USELESS for this. Stamina isn't much help when *traction* is the problem, feet aren't good as snowshowe-paws at snow, fingers aren't as good as claws for climbing ice...
Here. Have a bobcat in over its head in the snow...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBJlllHbe4
Mwahahahahha. I love your brain.
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Snow leopards can run at a maximum speed of 55 miles per hour though they cannot maintain this much speed for longer time. They will only attain the maximum speed over short bursts. While they give up in long chases, snow leopards usually run at 35 – 40 miles per hour—enough to catch any land predator moving into the mountains of Himalayas.
Assuming that they have to go a bit slower than optimal in a blizzard (a severe snow storm with winds in excess of 35 mph and visibility of less than a 1/4 mile for more than 3 hours) because of white-out conditions and wind resistance, and allowing for one of them needing medical treatment...say that they're traveling at 15-20 miles per hour in snow leopard form and much, much slower in human form. Snow can be heavy and downright exhausting to slog through. And humans are tend to wander in circles without the sun to guide them. And their safety (because hypothermia doesn't care about resilience) would depend on how close they were to the nearest location that could provide heat, hydration and medical care.
I can see them getting through the blizzard, but it would likely be difficult and unpleasant.
Does that help?
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Leopards, like other felids, don't sweat — they have to dump heat through respiration, so going fast and using skeletal musculature a lot will lead to heatstroke if they keep it up for too long.
So I'm going to go with "can sprint at up to 55mph briefly, can run at 34-40mph for a couple of miles — but aren't significantly faster than a human across marathon distances".
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(heeeey, new book!)
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Much as I hate the heat, I will choose to live someplace warm over someplace miserably cold any day. ( It was not actively snowing on my walk. The wind had mostly died down to a reasonable level, except when gusts would toss a batch of snow from an awning into my face. Not living year round somewhere where it does that, I did not have ideal gear-- a men's windproof Patagonia windblock fleece in lieu of a ski style jacket, and lined isotoner gloves instead of ski/ snowboard style ones.)
What someone said above about 10 being a magic number is pretty spot on. Days that get into the 30s or 20s are doable with what I had on. I wouldn't have tried a walk in 10 degrees or less ( and I had to wait until the afternoon for it to get up to ten degrees) in those clothes otherwise. ( I did have good waterproof hiking boots because snow.)
If you've never trudged through snow before, think of it as very cold sand but with the added challenge of the possiblity of ice you could slip and kill yourself on if the blizzard is happening anyplace where ice might be an issue. (In snow accumulation, over multiple days, if the temperature swings enough, some of the snow will melt, and then when the temp drops back down, that water will freeze, often underneath the snow.)
True, falling and slipping onto soft, fluffy snow is not a huge deal. But falling onto wet snow is awful.wet snow is also heavy. And falling onto hard packed snow or snow with a layer of ice on the top is also different. ( My latest winter trip home afforded me a review of all the frozen precipitation types: sleet, freezing rain, snow, and hail.)
Oh, and if your hair starts out or gets wet, it can freeze. Definitely on the list of reasons I moved away from places where frozen precipitation falls from the sky.
The wind is a big factor. When it is cold enough, breathing air that cold is super painful. At least, to me.
Hopefully, you find some details in there to inspire you. Right now. i am feeling very good about my choice to have moved to California.
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And it doesn't have to be particularly cold, and it doesn't take particularly long, for this to happen. When I was in college, my hair regularly froze on the ten-minute walk from the gym to the cafeteria. And it wasn't that cold--cold enough for there to be snow on the ground everywhere, but warm enough to be wearing jeans, long sleeves, and a pullover.
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My hair froze between my dorm and my early morning class once my first year of college; it was a small campus, and only about a 5-10 minute walk.
In high school, when I was life guarding in the South, my hair mildewed. Someone I met a few years ago who grew up in central Florida said that that happened to plenty of people there.
A Girl Scout trip to Wyoming in high school seemed like magic to me; my hair dried in the non-humid climate in something like 20 minutes. As far as I was concerned, from that point on, my goal was to move somewhere without much humidity where the temperature did not get low enough for freezing hair. (I will say that frozen hair does set the curl very nicely.)
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(The other big one being "how can I force these characters into the same location so they have an excuse to talk?")