It is currently Tuesday, which means the sun has been out for approximately forty-five minutes and every roof in downtown Bozeman has turned into a tactical munitions depot. I walked down Main Street this morning and was forced to dodge a jagged, translucent spear of ice that narrowly missed my favorite North Face fleece. This is not just a nuisance; it is a fundamental breakdown of our civic contract.

Why are we allowing these architectural hazards to exist above public thoroughfares? I spoke with Gary Pumpernickel, a local retiree who has spent the last three days pacing outside his condo on North Bozeman. “It’s a game of Russian Roulette,” Gary told me while eyeing a particularly bulbous icicle hanging over the local coffee shop. “You walk out for a latte, you get impaled. It’s the Bozeman tax.”

He is right. We talk extensively about traffic flow and zoning density, yet we ignore the fact that our streets are currently booby-trapped. If a building is tall enough to house a luxury yoga studio, it is surely tall enough to require heated eaves or a professional ice-removal squad.

I don’t think it is too much to ask for a city-wide policy on cornice management. We pride ourselves on being a world-class destination, yet we are constantly looking over our shoulders to ensure we aren’t flattened by a frozen chunk of runoff. It makes it very difficult to enjoy a brisk walk when one is wearing a bike helmet for urban protection. Winter is supposed to be about silence and snow, not calculating the trajectory of a three-foot icicle.

I’ll be wearing my hard hat until the thaw in May.

Meredith Coldsnap is a seasonal columnist who writes exclusively between October and May, which in Bozeman is most of the year. She owns fourteen fleece jackets.