Posts Tagged ‘mixed precipitation’
Saturated Snow
The weather played out just like the forecasters predicted. Overnight Sunday into Monday the snowflakes flew with an unrelenting intensity. I woke in the middle of the night and saw it was piling up to an impressive depth on the deck railing out back.
It started to change over to a mixture of rain and snow a couple of hours before sunrise. I knew the moment I stepped outside yesterday morning the snow was the consistency of wet cement.
Two of the horses stayed totally dry. The other two looked totally wet. They all appeared to be coping just fine.
I grabbed a shovel and headed down toward the road. I wanted to see how deep the snow was on the driveway and check on the mailbox that usually gets blasted by snow shooting off the blade of the township plow truck.
Just as I stepped out of the barn, I heard the truck coming. I was not going to get there in time to save the mailbox. Luckily, it wasn’t an issue. The driver was working at a controlled speed to push the slop to the side, not throw it well off into the ditches. The mailbox was fine.
The snow depth on the driveway was borderline worth plowing. The challenge would be all the water saturating the bottom couple of inches.
I decided to try running the Grizzly ATV up and down the driveway to disrupt the sloppy covering of snow, half hoping it might be enough to make it easily navigable by cars.
The ATV tracks made it look easy enough to plow so I went for it and lowered the blade at its sharpest angle. I don’t know that it made it any easier but the pavement cleaned up nicely in just a handful of slip-sliding passes.
I wasn’t going to even try the plow blade around the hay shed. I made multiple passes to break up the snow and called it good enough. When we went down to feed the horses at dinner time, there was standing water in many of those tire tracks.
Based on evidence on the ground in the paddocks, several, if not all of the horses, did some lying down in that soaking wet mess with their blankets on. Well, blankets mostly on. Swings managed to fold hers over off her butt.
You can see her back foot standing on the dragging blanket making it hard to move forward. That area just beyond the overhang is even more like wet cement with the combination of sand and saturated snow. The back corner of Swings’ blanket is a mud-saster.
Too bad she’s not one to stand out in the rain. Some precipitation might help rinse off all the muck.
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Sloppy Snow
After reading in yesterday’s paper that the warming of the Earth is bringing rain to the Arctic regions, I feel a little sheepish about my whining over getting rain in December at our latitude. Honestly, I could adjust my thinking to accept the rain if that’s all it was but the reality is that we get rain mixed with sleet which then turns to snow. Usually, heavy, wet snow.
My work area just beyond the overhang in the paddocks has turned into a muddy mess again. The horses take it in stride but the sloppy footing makes my maneuvering much less pleasant.
Cleaning off the driveway is a whole other battle in these conditions. When a small amount of snow falls, it isn’t worth bothering to plow, however, shoveling the area in front of the house keeps it from becoming messy.
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Trying to plow the water-logged slop may have cleaned the pavement nicely, but by the time I was able to consider it, the slushy snow was starting to refreeze. The duration of this precipitation is predicted to last a couple more days so I expect I will need to plow at some point. Too bad it will be a frozen mess underneath any real snow that eventually accumulates.
I tell ya, it’s the in-between conditions of mixed winter precipitation that are the most frustrating to deal with. That is until we receive massive amounts of snow in one dump. Then that is the most frustrating to deal with.
Today, it is the rain mixed with sleet that eventually turns to snow that is crimping my style. It’s getting to be almost as bad as the Arctic around here. Not that I would whine about such a thing as crummy weather.
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More Melting
A local meteorologist on the radio pointed out the previous two days were our first pair of consecutive days of temperatures in the 40s (F) since December when we experienced a tornado in the area. Two days of melting is visibly changing our snowscape.
As we made our way around the north loop trail yesterday, I found it interesting that no old footprints were apparent along the pathway, yet the trail we repeatedly walk was clearly outlined.
I suspect that blowing snow had filled the path while we were up at the lake over the weekend and now it’s all being glazed level with the surrounding snowpack. We trudged through it seconds after I took that picture, taking the first steps toward reestablishing our typical packed trail.
The first week of March is predicted to bring us melting temperatures during the days and several chances for a mix of precipitation.
We noticed yesterday afternoon that the horses are starting to shed a little bit of their winter coat. The prospect of wet precipitation and near-freezing temperatures is an unwelcome combination when it comes to horses. As is our normal practice, we have closed some gates to separate the herd into two groups of two so there will be less competition over access to the protection of the barn overhang.
After the anxiety they showed the last time we moved them into stalls in the barn, I am not as quick to choose that option for keeping them dry. We are going to make the overhang as available as possible and leave it up to them to take advantage of it, or not.
You know the old saying… “You can provide a horse some shelter from the rain, but you can’t make him (or her, or them) use it.”
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Relative Something 