Posts Tagged ‘melting snow’
Melt Continues
Even though it felt seriously cold outside yesterday, with the wind making it seem like January again, the slow meltdown continues to progress without serious complications. The sand floor of the barn still stays wet where water has seeped in a couple of times when there was nowhere else for it to go. Beyond that, meltwater is all running calmly along our drainage swales as intended.
With the recent rainstorms that have moved through, the surface just beyond the barn overhang is once again as muddy as ever. When the last of the snow finally melts away I will miss the convenience of cleaning my boots in the lingering piles before returning to the house after feeding the horses.
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Looking in one direction along the driveway reveals plenty of newly visible ground.
Turning around to look up toward the house gives a much different impression.
On Tuesday night I watched the first of a 3-part PBS Frontline documentary series, “America and the Taliban,” and was impressed by the combination of perspectives provided from both sides. My viewing of this happened shortly after I had come upon a video interview with 9/11 survivor Pasquale Buzzelli where he described one of the ways he dealt with his survivor guilt.
With these powerful episodes resonating in my mind, one right after the other, I’m feeling an unexpected flashback to September 2001. I didn’t immediately know the attacks were happening at the time. In an office in the middle of a building, I placed a call to a person I knew about some mundane issue and was met with a strange response from her. It caught me off guard. She conveyed a sense of our issue being rather meaningless in the face of things.
In the face of what things? She just assumed I was aware of what was going on. This was when I learned planes had flown into the Twin Towers.
Pasquale Buzzelli described a point [me paraphrasing] in his psychological recovery when he put himself in the shoes of a friend/coworker who died when the tower collapsed. Imagining what the dead man would think about Pasquale surviving –or if Pasquale had died and was looking at his friend who survived– he surmised that the hope and desires of the deceased spirit would be that the survivor would get on with life and live it to the fullest possible extent. Doing so becomes a way to honor those who didn’t survive.
It helped Pasquale to move beyond the funk in which he had been floundering.
The Frontline documentary touches on the issue of Taliban bombings killing innocent Afghan citizens –women and children. It still seems unjustifiable in every way, but when the Taliban official being interviewed framed it from his view of the situation being a war to rid his country of invaders, I felt a moment of being able to perceive his perspective.
Two things on my mind from this throwback to the terror attacks:
- In 2001, terrorists worked on their plan for months and within our borders while I was unaware. Are there other long-game attacks in the works in 2023 that our intelligence is missing while threats from China, Russia, and an indicted past US President dominate the news?
- We should ALL be honoring those who don’t survive or those who are our ancestors by striving to become the best we can be.
We are no better than anyone else in the world, but we can become the best of ourselves if we sincerely put our minds to it.
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My Reality
Each day when I describe details of my experiences it is a function of a basic tenet of writing: write what you know. One thing I know about is the perceptions I have of the activities of my days. Yesterday, I turned my back on the NCAA Women’s national championship game when it became obvious to me that Iowa would not beat LSU and I went out to tend to the horses.
A glance at the reading from our outdoor thermometer surprised me with the number 51. Looking for a second source, I opened a weather app to see what it offered for a current temperature. The reading from Red Wing, MN –twenty miles to our south– was 57°F! I did not expect this level of warming yesterday. The new snow remaining on the ground from the blizzard Friday night was quickly being transformed into water. Our drainage ditches were flowing like rivers.
I have no idea how this fits into the entanglement of the quantum mechanics of our physical world, but I do know that this quick melt significantly increased the level of mud in the paddocks. At the same time, I cannot describe how I occasionally get a sense of someone in Nepal practicing an endless recitation of the mantra “om mani padme hum” as I breathe our air and take meandering steps half a planet away.
The horses were giving me the impression of being spectacularly patient about the slow melt we’ve been having this spring while they were also slipping into behaviors of being annoyingly impatient about getting served pans of feed after I showed up. The impatience is easily soothed by the arrival of their food and the quartet of munching sounds conveys a new meditative peacefulness that I gladly absorb.
It is April and there is a reason to think we might be gardening soon. Does this image look like our garden is eager to get going?:
I’m trying to absorb some of the horses’ patience about the uneven transition from the snow season to our growing season.
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Gentle Melt
This week we have been blessed with weather that is melting the snowpack in gradual steps, stopping overnight when the temperature drops below freezing and then gradually starting to melt again as the solar rays increase throughout the day. It’s the best outcome for avoiding flooding extremes.
Yesterday afternoon was the first time I finally was able to see the water flowing out of our drainage culverts as the snow cover receded.
There still is evidence of the significant amount of snow we received this year. I saw in yesterday’s news that the Twin Cities snowfall amount thus far is the eighth-snowiest since records have been kept. The snow that has slid off the hay shed roof all season is going to take a long time to melt, being in the shade most hours of the day.
It’s hard for me to see it but I read recently that our snow cover melts from the ground up. The roots of our trees must be warmer than the surrounding areas because the snow has visibly disappeared around the trees faster than everywhere else.
We are anxious to enjoy some 50-degree days but I’m willing to wait while days in the 40s are slowly, gently melting the snow and calmly flowing through our drainage ditches. One question lingers… how much longer should I leave the plow blade mounted to the ATV?
I will never shake the memory of our first spring here when 18 inches of heavy spring snow fell on May 3 after a dry warm spell in April. If I take off the plow blade, it won’t be stored very far away from easy access if needed.
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Weather Related
Just in case you didn’t expect me to write about the weather today, I put it in the title to give you a warning. Where would I be if I didn’t have the topic of the weather to resort to when nothing fantastical happens worth telling? If you ask Cyndie, she’d say we need to get another dog. I find myself in hesitation mode about making that commitment again.
Speaking of the weather, I would like to present “exhibit A” as a photo to show how the increasing angle of the sun is having a visible impact on our snowpack even during the last few days when we experienced single-digit temperatures that felt ripped right out of January:
The right side of the driveway receives a direct blast of sunshine on blue-sky days while the left side does not.
Another phenomenon we are witnessing is the growing icy mounds where flowing meltwater, under pressure from the terrain, pushes up and re-freezes into surprising-looking high spots of particular hazard to hoofed navigation.
The area beneath the old willow tree in the small paddock has melted down to the dirt but the snowpack glacier a short distance beyond is currently getting thicker as melting occurs uphill and flows down to re-freeze right in front of a gate opening.
The horses wisely refrain from venturing out onto the icy surface.
Much less wise was Light’s decision to bolt in an unnecessary panic to get past me and away from Mix when Swings decided to walk over to the other side of the overhang. Swings had been successively switching sides as she waited for me to finish my housekeeping work before serving up feed yesterday morning. Light had made it a mission to follow along with Swings each time.
That meant I was frequently needing to work around their feet as they intruded on and then evacuated from the space where I was trying to scoop manure. On the last iteration of this dance, Light suddenly decided she needed to hurry to keep up with Swings. Light torqued to avoid me by about an inch but that put her off balance as she was passing through the narrow space of the single fence section that is opposite the swinging gates.
I watched with alarm as the weight of her body pushed against the fence boards, flexing them dramatically –I prepared for them to give way, but they held– before her leg slammed into the post at the other end, jolting her a bit as she continued beyond it. That brought her free to stop behind Swings who was by then standing idly.
It all happened so fast that there was nothing I could do but stare in shock over the spectacle. I noticed Light pick up her front leg and bend the joints in a way that I interpreted as her saying, “Damn! That hurt!”
I fully expected to find remnants of her hide stuck to the post after that but I didn’t find any visible damage on her or the post.
When the footing improves in the rest of the paddock spaces, I think the horses are going to be very happy to spend more time away from the close quarters under the overhang.
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Snow Expected
They tell us to expect fresh snow this week after a prolonged span of February days without frozen precipitation piling up. I have been enjoying the freedom from needing to plow and shovel, but I get a sense that I haven’t enjoyed it as much as I should. Now that this freedom is coming to an end, it feels like I have taken the pause for granted.
I’ve always felt a fondness for the look of one thing fading into another. Especially, gradual gradients. Yesterday, I took pictures of the old snow where it was melting back to reveal the ground below.
It has a bit of a yin and yang feeling to it.
I’m also fascinated by the way leaves melt into the snow.
Looks like there was a fish beside it. Notice the hint of a yin and yang curve in those two, as well.
If the forecast is correct, it will all be covered in white again before the week is over. The cosmic duality of opposing forces of winter precipitation covering the dark earth.
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Still Melting
Sunny afternoons have become the norm and the melting of snow continues. A larger section of snow has broken off the garage roof.
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I left it lay and headed inside to watch Superbowl hype. I wasn’t very invested in the activity surrounding the game but enjoyed that the scoring was as balanced as it was. It provided a welcome distraction from more serious matters in the world for a few hours. What’s with all the unidentified objects getting shot down from our skies?
If my home team was one of the teams in that game I wouldn’t have enjoyed the stress. I probably would have gone out to shovel snow away from the garage door and read about the outcome after the fact.
I felt a little melted, myself yesterday. Our night out to Chanhassen on Saturday had us up well past a healthy bedtime. We arrived home well after midnight, which cut deeply into my hours of sleep. There is no sleeping-in beyond the normal feeding time of the horses in the morning, so hours of sleep lost at the beginning of my nights are not able to be paid back after sunrise.
It was grand being able to turn in at a decent hour last night. Unfortunately, it still feels like a Monday this morning, which is weird because, in my retirement, there is no real difference from one day to another.
Maybe since it is Monday the 13th it feels spookier. Why didn’t that become a thing? Sounds a lot more ominous than Friday the 13th to me.
I hope you don’t feel melted this morning, especially if you celebrated a little excessively for the big game last night. Congratulations to Kansas City fans!
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Grim Grip
With temperatures hovering just above the freezing point, snow is slowly sliding off our slanted rooftops. As I was returning to the house from the barn, I spotted what looked like the large bony fingers of the Grim Reaper about to grasp the edge of the short roof over the entryway of the shop.
The rest of that section had broken off and dropped to the concrete surface below.
I would like to have recorded a time-lapse video of the slow melting as the snow slid off the roof. It is fascinating that it created that bony-looking curl.
Speaking of bones, I’m driving Cyndie to an appointment this morning to have her bone density analyzed. The trauma surgeon who repaired her ankle put in the order to have her bone density checked in light of the way her broken bones splintered into fragments.
Yesterday, Cyndie’s physical therapist massaged some of the excess fluid out of her foot and gave her a few more non-weight-bearing exercises to try. The options are pretty limited until she gets permission to put weight on that foot. The exercises are rather simplistic and uninspiring otherwise, at this point.
It’s pretty tricky crutching weather out there while this wet weather system is spinning over us. We have been getting mostly spotty light rain since yesterday late afternoon, but with the temperature lingering so close to the freezing point it is hard to know when the footing is merely wet or has become dangerously slippery.
There is something about going in for a bone density test that begs for a person to not fall and break anything on the way in. The Grim Reaper doesn’t get into the business of influencing us before the final calling does he/she/it?
Some days I feel like I should wear a couple of protective boots similar to the one Cyndie has, as a proactive prevention of possible foot/ankle injuries. Or I could keep eating a healthy diet that maintains a strong body. Are Christmas cookies good for our bones?
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Problem Postponed
My concerns about clearing the snow off our driveway were unwarranted. The warmth still in the ground was slowly melting the snow from below. Upon first light yesterday morning, I could see that plowing would be unnecessary. As the day wore on, the surface of the driveway just continued to lose snow cover, even though light snowfall continued off and on all day.
It wasn’t enough new snow to overcome the dark, wet driveway surface. Sure looks like a new layer of asphalt, doesn’t it?
Being new, it lacks the texture of the old, worn pavement we replaced. Sure, the old surface was breaking apart, but it provided traction! As a result, the new driveway threatens to be much more slippery than we are used to. I hunted down an empty bucket and started putting in a variety of sand and gravel so we will have something to throw down on bad sections after the residual ground warmth completely fades.
By then, I will be less concerned about driving the ATV along the shoulders when plowing because they will be frozen, too. The postponed problem will no longer be a problem at all.
Here’s hoping… Look at me, wishing for it to get freezing cold. That’s not usually the kind of desire an old man professes. Must be my inner child talking.
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Words Emerge
Spring has arrived on the calendar. Maybe that explains all this spring-like evidence unfolding before our eyes. Mud, primarily. Yesterday, I opened some gates for the horses that we have historically held open using step-in posts. Without thinking, I attempted to step them in and quickly met the resistance of frozen ground an inch or two below the surface.
It’s only spring on the surface thus far.
There is still snow in the woods, but it is shrinking by the minute.
The wooden blocks of the “boardwalk” we installed on a section of trail that gets the muddiest are beginning to reappear.
Cyndie has painted words of inspiration on some of them and it looks like those messages have survived the winter just fine.
Out on the open road I didn’t find any traces of snow while spending time on my new bicycle in the afternoon. I’m pretty confident I will never regret purchasing an e-bike. Having that motor assist took much of the stress out of my first real ride of the season.
Like the emerging words say, LOVE always. I expect I will be loving this bike for the rest of my life.
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Ground Visible
The change of seasons is marching full ahead with great results. I appreciate that our snowpack’s meltdown has been happening at a perfectly gradual pace. It’s been cool enough during the overnights that melting pauses so the runoff has been controlled, for the most part.
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Delilah and I found the fields entirely bare when we emerged from the woods where there was still snow covering the ground on our morning stroll.
By afternoon, water was flowing as the melting of remaining snow picked up again. It is very rewarding to witness the unimpeded drainage flowing where Cyndie and I worked hard to correct the grade in front of her perennial garden last year.
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My “swale” in the paddock hadn’t maintained its shape nearly as well and the water was draining randomly across the main travel path of two gateways where hoof prints in the soft earth disrupt any coordinated drainage. While cleaning up manure yesterday afternoon, I did a rudimentary job of stemming the flow as best I could, using the flimsy plastic tines of my fork scoop tool.
I want the water to flow out of the paddock to the left of the gate opening to the hayfield, not across the primary travel pattern of the horses. Any attempts I make toward achieving this goal end up getting stomped on by horses who don’t seem to notice what my efforts are intended to accomplish for them.
It’s almost like they have no idea how much they weigh and the amount of disruption in soft, wet soil they create.
One other creature who has no idea how much of a disaster she creates is Delilah. She prances around everywhere she pleases in the snow and mud and then assumes a little toweling off when we come inside the house and she’s good to go.
Sweeping the floor is an adventure after practically every outing.
Yeah, the ground is visible alright.
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Relative Something 