Thanks Tequila! Did you post your bypass on TrailVoy? it sounds familiar...
TO EVERYBODY: I think the official ground clearance on my '04 Envoy is stated as 8 inches. I don't know if that's the bottom of the front bumper cover lip/deflector, the rear swaybar/differential, the oil pan, or something else. Some nights (or days) we get more snow than that in a few hours! My last vehicle was a ZR2 truck--stock from the factory, I can stick my head between the tire tops (31x10.50R15's) and the fender flare bottoms, and the fenderwells were probably another 4-6" up. I don't know what to do when it snows with this Envoy... I wouldn't consider myself an off-roader but we get similar or worse conditions after or during LES...
I'm sure I did, but I might've also gotten the idea from there. The hardest part was getting the 3 way "Tee" fitting - well, getting just ONE of them. Grainger wanted me to buy 50 of them and they refused to open a bag and sell me just one...
As for snow, my 2002 Olds Bravada is AWD but otherwise identical to your Envoy and it does pretty good in the snow. I say "pretty good" because I've got the worst tires I've ever owned on it right now. They're so bad that AWD engages every time I start going again after stopping in the rain... every time. When I had very good all season semi-offroad tires on it, it was practically unstoppable in the snow. As for quantities of snow... I'm in central PA. It's not exactly Buffalo, NY... but on several occasions in the past few years we've gotten FEET in hours... and I've always made it home. I'm also a volunteer firefighter/EMR and do search and rescue. My Bravada has seen a fair amount of offroading and even pulled an ambulance out of a field when the inexperienced driver mistook a field entrance for a driveway. When I traveled 300 miles to attend my mother's funeral I got 10 miles from the funeral home when the road ahead of me was closed due to severe icing and several bad accidents. I opted to backtrack and take a "trail" to get around it. This turned into about 12 miles of what hardly qualify as dirt roads - very hilly ones at that - that hadn't ever seen a snow plow and it had snowed well over a foot by then and the trail that I remembered had been.... we'll say "neglected"... since I last drove on it 20 years prior.
"Ground Clearance" should refer to the lowest non-tire point on the vehicle... either the diff or the bottom of the steering knuckle. Lifting doesn't improve that without bigger tires and there are some caveats to be aware of if attempting to install larger tires. That's a topic all to itself.