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Four inches of snow is hardly enough to make Anchorage blink, and in Valdez it's almost too little to measure.

But in the high Arctic desert of Barrow, a 4-inch accumulation is reason to break out the sleds, shovels and snowmachines.

"I noticed a lot of snowmen the last few days," said Gina Sturm, of the National Weather Service in Barrow.

The storm that hit Saturday and Sunday piled up 4.1 inches in 24 hours, which is far from a record but definitely more than average. Barrow is usually so cold that snowstorms often leave only a dusting, Sturm said, though one blizzard in 1926 dropped a record-breaking 15 inches.

That's not much by Alaska standards. Valdez once got almost 48 inches in a day, and last New Year's Eve it recorded 37.3 inches, said Rodger Wilson. At Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, the 24-hour record is 26 inches, set March 16-17, 2002, according to John Stepetin.

But Barrow is a virtual desert, receiving the equivalent of less than 6 inches of rain a year.

"To have 4 or 5 inches of snow all at once is half an inch of precipitation," Sturm said. "It's gone from a little snow with gravel and grass to solid snow. We just kinda got winter all at once."

The kids were thrilled, said Juanita Kignak, assistant manager at Eskimos Inc., a local snowmachine dealer.

"They're out there playing in the snow, making snowmans, driving their little machines out there," she said. "It doesn't matter how wet they get."

A lifelong resident of Barrow, Kignak said it always takes a good snowstorm to kick off the winter.

"Everybody in town started their machines as soon as the snow hit," she said. Customers have been pouring in to buy parts for repairs, she added.

But the North Slope Borough also played a role in her booming sales, Kignak said. The borough this year announced it would no longer plow driveways and lots.

"You have to do it yourself," she said, and there are no snowplows in Barrow. "We sell a lot of aluminum shovels."