Moist and mushy - and scary too

Lessons learned from six feet of snow: Don't let the dog poop in the pool. Some time around November it became too cold to go outside with Root Beer. Instead of racing behind her like we were accustomed to in the summer months (and picking up the poop right away), we let her run to the bushes and hide her business.
And then the snow fell. When it was just a fresh dusting, we spent time picking poop up. However, in Winnipeg, in winter, the snow doesn't dust - it crushes, it hurls and it falls. There isn't any 'picking up' because there isn't any stopping. When the snow does stop and you do step outside, your innards freeze.
If you're a Manitoban, you know better then to go outside in January. You keep as much heat inside as possible. In February, it came to our attention that Root Beer liked to find ground that wasn't six-feet deep to drop her steaming bundles or aromatic waste. As many know, a swimming pool in the backyard, in winter, offers a natural depression. The snow in the swimming pool isn't as deep as its neighbouring snowflakes in the backyard.
For a dog who doesn't like to dig, a pool in the winter is a nice place to poo. We picked a lot of low-lying poo from the easy to use backyard 'depression'.
In February we picked up three black bags of dog crap. We thought we were done. Every day we picked up poop, every day we picked up more. It was a problem that befuddled. Really, she's not that big a dog.
And then we realized... as the snow started to slowly melt, the poop we were picking up was last year's deposit. We were in a race. The dog, the doo-doo, the melt. Three weekends ago we took two shovels and we spent two days uncovering landmines. We filled more than a dozen garbage bags. Truthfully poos are dangerous, bacteria-infested, logs of lethal e-coli. One Oh-Henry shaped bar would be enough to close the pool down for the summer or cause a $300 dump of water in the spring. Neither alternative was particularly attractive. We took the last of the poo off the still-almost- I-guess-it's-not dangerous mushy ice, and the next day the ice cracked.
Root Beer isn't allowed in the backyard any more.It's dangerous for her and potentially expensive for us. Her dog run is beside the house, not near water or ice, and yet the Hefty bags are still out every morning, scouting for errant waste, but it's almost all behind us now.