It's after the Fourth of July and there is still a pile of snow at MSP Airport

MINNEAPOLIS -- It's probably not a terrible surprise to anyone familiar with Minnesota winters, but we're well into the midsection of summer at this point ... and there's still snow on the ground at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

According to the airport's Twitter account, the pile of snow that was building up all winter was still lingering as of Friday. That was, as a reminder, at the tail end of the hottest week on record for the planet, overall.

Granted, much if not most of that pile looks to be sand and debris at this point, and certainly not the sort of material you'd use to build a snowman in July.

Nonetheless, Twitter users had a field day with the revelation that Minnesota just can't have nice things -- like a summer without snow.

"Can we go skiing on it?" asked Charlie Casserly.

"You can do it little buddy," encouraged Chaz Rice.

"Like, don't you just want to go out there and break it up, kick it into the street, chop at it a little, etc, so it melts the rest of the way? That's an April move, May at the latest," joked Tony Frolik.

While the airport's post, and the comments it inspired, are all in the spirit of good fun, it is true that the most recent winter was a pretty brutal one by many measures. In addition to ranking as the ninth-longest stretch of days with at least 1 inch of snow on the ground, it was also the third-snowiest winter on record, according to the National Weather Service, and within about 9 inches of tying the all-time record.

In:
• Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
• Snow Totals
• Winters