With crampons, a set of carabiners, 60 yards of climbing rope and a team of Sherpas, you too might be able to ascend the snowbanks on your street, driveway or those along the side of Route 4.

They may get you thinking – as they’ve got us thinking – about who has ownership and responsibility for that frozen pile of precipitation. Although it resembles a glacier, it didn’t form naturally.

The short answers are nobody and everybody. Only one person’s laws applies to the accumulation of snow, and that’s Mother Nature. Legal and legislative minds decided long ago wintry conditions belie statute or common law.

“Because the volume and frequency of snowfall in Maine is so pervasive, the common law in this state has not assigned open-ended responsibility for snow-related accidents,” the Maine Supreme Judicial Court said last August, in evaluating a snow-related lawsuit. “Our common law reflects the widely held public acceptance of heavy snowfall and difficult driving as facts of life in Maine.”

Unless negligence or maliciousness occurs, towns and cities that provide plowing aren’t responsible for snowbank size, according the Maine Municipal Association. But determining anybody – public or private – falls under such standards is probably impossible anyway, given the incessant snowfall and sparse removal options.

As mortals, we must exercise caution. If snowbanks around your home, workplace or property are obscuring sightlines, chop them down.

The same for clearing sidewalks. Needing an ordinance or some other enforcement action is silly when its fastest to simply shovel. After several local roof collapses, building owners must consider the weight over their heads.

Driving means going slow and not taking chances around blind corners; the snowbank is immaterial in an accident.

And driving snowmobiles in all this powder means being prudent. Five people were killed last weekend on sleds, bringing the year’s total to nine. This has been a fine snowmobile season. It could last into April.

Let’s make it a safer one, as well as a longer one.

For as Maine’s courts and laws make clear, snow responsibility lies with the individual. Monstrous drifts and jagged, alpine banks come free with residency in this northern territory.

One might call it something for nothing, a fleecing of Mother Nature. We think this underestimates her savviness, as her gift has a no-return policy. We can have it, but we have to move it.

Which leaves us with a snowbank. And Mother Nature laughing all the way to it.