Posts Tagged ‘plowing snow’
Winter Wonderland
Well, it looks like we got the upper end of the predicted snowfall depth range. I know what I’ll be doing all day today. We postponed a lunch date so we can focus on clearing snow around here and avoid dodging snowplows clearing the rural roads.
Asher is in his glory over all the snow.
“Are we going outside yet?”
“How ‘bout now?”
We envy him his natural coat that allows immediate departure into the elements. He waits (mostly) patiently for us to don all our gear. When the door opens, and he hears permission granted, he bolts through it and leaps off the steps to race into the snow.
His favorite yard toys are Jolly Balls with rope strung through the middle of them. I guess the appeal is that he can both chase after it when we’ve heaved it as far as we can, and he can entice us into a battle of tug-of-war when he brings it back.
While we were out on a morning walk, before the snowstorm reached us, I spotted a single snowflake floating down out of the sky, triggering these curiosities:
- Does this also happen in the summer? Are there ever single raindrops that drop out of a cloud?
- Is it atypical for one snowflake or one raindrop to fall before any others in a precipitation event?
Eventually, a lot of flakes were falling at the same time.
With the base layer already in place, this new snow is going to make it look like a winter wonderland around here. I will need to wear snowshoes to pack down a path for walking Asher on all of our trails.
In the short time I was down at the barn feeding the horses in the afternoon, my bootprints on the driveway provided a reference for how fast the snow was accumulating.
I suspect those will be barely noticeable this morning. When Cyndie took Asher out for one last pee before bedtime, it was hard for her to push the storm door open against the snow piling up.
That tells me I’ll have my work cut out for me plowing it all.
This will not be one of the winters with concerns about whether or not we will have a white Christmas.
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Old Lessons
This is starting to feel like a real winter. For the first time in years, our temperature has not risen above freezing since dropping below in the last week of November. The snow that has fallen is accumulating, not melting. The 10-day forecast shows the trend will continue.
I have to admit, the last two years have lulled me into an uncharacteristic lackadaisical attitude about my techniques of managing the cold and snow. Case in point, that dang plow blade on the Grizzly. It took me three tries to get the mechanisms of the winch-lift and the catch-pin of the blade angle connected so they wouldn’t interfere with each other.
The solution was so obvious when I took the time to consider it. I’m a little sad that my memory of how it worked in the past, before I added the now-failed bracket, made this into a bigger deal than it deserved.
Yesterday, I was finally able to run the plow along the edges of the driveway to push the snow bank one length beyond the pavement. Like any good winter, as soon as I finished, it started snowing again, covering the surface with a new dusting of flakes.
While returning from a walk with Asher, Cyndie had me call his name in a fresh exercise of following commands.
She had been out on Friday night to meet Elysa in Hudson for a creative art experience. I took Asher out with me that night, thinking he would hang around while I cleared some of the freshly fallen snow. He disappeared into the darkness and was gone for two hours. It serves me right for recently bragging about how great it’s been having him stay around.
I’m blaming the darkness of night and the wealth of nocturnal critters available to tempt him. Last night, when I took him out, however, I used a leash. Fool me once…
Not that darkness is the only time he faces temptations to chase prey. The rabbits have been plentiful this year, and he is more than happy to race after them at every opportunity. They are creating well-worn trails in the snow toward the barn overhang, where there is an endless supply of spilled senior horse food pellets to eat.
We are no longer surprised when we show up to sweep off the placemats before feeding and find them already cleaned.
The horses are coping well with the impact of real winter weather. It seems they remember how to do this better than I do.
I trust I will get the hang of it after a few more decent snowfalls. Clearing fallen snow is almost like riding a bike. Once you get it down, it just gets easier as you go along.
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Multiple Failures
Yesterday was a failure for me in two ways. My ill-conceived attempt to simplify the connection of the winch hook to the plow blade proved woefully insufficient. To distract me from that frustration, I turned on the Vikings football game and was faced with a profound embarrassment for the team and all of its fans.
It looked like we probably got around 5-6 inches of snow accumulation from Saturday’s storm. The ground isn’t frozen solid yet, and what little residual warmth still exists was making the base layer just sticky enough to be annoying. It stuck to the plow blade and to the shovels. It is such a draining tedium when half a shovel-full stays on the shovel after every attempt to toss it.
I have needed to plow so infrequently over the last two winters that I guess I’m out of practice. I forgot how much the nylon rope on my winch stretches as it gets repeatedly snugged with a constant back and forth from lifting and dropping the blade. The added weight of snow sticking to the blade exacerbated the issue.
The kicker that ultimately caused me to give up trying was that the mechanism to pull a pin back, allowing the blade to be angled, stopped working. I assumed it was frozen with packed ice and snow, so I parked the Grizzly back in the garage to be dealt with later.
That left me doing more hand shoveling than I would have liked, but I got enough done to receive our guests for brunch with the place looking satisfactorily welcoming.
Today, I will be giving the winch lift issue the time and attention it deserves to resolve it. I’m not sure if the problem with the pin for blade-angle adjustment was an isolated incident or something more concerning. The mechanism was used when we bought the ATV, and that was 13 winters ago. It won’t be a big shock if something’s just plum worn out.
Like any good glutton for punishment, I turned on the football game after our guests left. Ouch. Seriously, ouch. It was painful to witness. The one positive I can take from the spectacle of the offense’s epic ineffectiveness is that I have no reason to look for entertainment in watching them play for the rest of the season.
I’d rather settle into my favorite recliner and finish some of the books that I’m currently juggling.
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Pretty Colors
Have I written much about the weather lately? When I’m trying to pretend my country isn’t spiraling ridiculously down the proverbial drain, the weather provides a convenient distraction. One thing I appreciate about weather is that the conditions I experience right outside our door are the pure truth. It is hard to gaslight me and tell me that the snow falling isn’t actually falling when I can see it absolutely is.
In the dark of night last evening, we could hear the pelting rain on the roof, but the radar image of the storm revealed the full gamut of what was swirling our way.
So many pretty colors! I am curious what we will find when dawn breaks. The ground was completely covered in white when we headed for bed last night.
We have been warned about the probability of heavy, wet snow in the amounts of 4-8 inches. I’m not looking forward to the effort of pushing wet snow off the driveway with the ATV plow. At least I have the benefit of sun and melting temperatures expected to follow this batch of precipitation. I can get away with doing a rudimentary job of exposing pavement. Solar energy will clean up the asphalt in short order.
My plan at the beginning of this week was to head out today for a solo mini-vacation to the lake for a few days. Cyndie just returned from California for the second visit in several weeks and will be leaving for Florida next week, so my getaway is a chance to balance the workload of taking care of the ranch alone.
I will relish the time free from dog walking and horse care since they become my exclusive priorities whenever Cyndie is away. I love the job, I really do, but I also love the opportunity to stay in bed for as long as my brain and body desire and then do whatever I want for the rest of a day without worrying about any other tasks that need to happen.
Sometimes, the best adventure is no adventure at all. Or, the adventure is in following whatever whim shows up and letting it play out for as long as it holds interest before dashing off after whatever shiny thing grabs one’s attention next.
I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit how often the adventure I long to experience involves lounging in bed well past a decent hour and falling back to sleep whenever sleep beckons. Some of the best dreams come to me in the morning hours. My mind is most creative in the morning. I have found that most of the time when I have mentally conjured up solutions to the world’s problems, it has been before dawn. Like a dream, I tend to forget those solutions by breakfast time.
Maybe tomorrow, I will wake up at the lake and take a crack at the long, slow effort to get out of bed. It all depends on when snow stops falling and how long it takes me to plow and shovel pathways for Cyndie to navigate while I’m gone.
That is today’s adventure.
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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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Just Enough
We got just enough snow overnight to justify using the Grizzly to plow. It’s hard to tell how much snow fell out of the sky because it was/is windy and some areas are blown free of snow (like the deck railing which is usually a good gauge) and some drifted deeper than what truly fell.
Horses have blankets on in advance of the polar plunge as temperatures are predicted to plummet for the next few days.
This feels a little more like winter for our region. Almost the middle of January and the first driveway plowing of the season. Can’t complain about not being ready, I guess.
Bring on the NFL playoff games and a warm fire in the fireplace. (Glad I’m not playing football outside tonight in these conditions.)
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Mystery Solved
There are times when the answers to life’s mysteries make total sense. In this case, it was hardly a surprise. Late yesterday afternoon, Cyndie received a message from our weekend horse sitter apologizing for accidentally pushing a button on the remote controller of the AppleTV and seeing a message she had subscribed to some channel.
That explained the “Subscription Confirmation” email I received Friday. We had invited the sitter to stay at the house if she wanted and then quickly forgot it meant she would be using our media setup.
My new mystery is how I should deal with the skating rink that has evolved on top of the gravel drive in front of the barn. As soon as we got home from the lake yesterday, I headed out to plow and quickly got stuck trying to push large amounts of snow over the icy surface.
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I resorted to making multiple passes around the hay shed with the blade lifted, just to disturb the deep snow. Next, I tried barely lowering the blade and pushing small amounts to the side, Sometimes, when the wheels just spun on ice, I would get off and shove the ATV sideways and then try again. Slow rocking got me going eventually.
In the end, I used a wide hand shovel to distribute a layer of snow evenly over the slipperiest parts, hoping it might refreeze and offer better traction than just the ice.
The thing is, now we are expecting freezing rain, so it is hard to guess what that surface will change to by the end of the day. Whatever it becomes, I didn’t want the new precipitation to be on top of the deep snow that I had yet to clear after last Thursday’s storm.
It felt good to get that addressed last night after having left it to go up to the lake for the weekend. Now I’ll just sit back and watch what today brings. Happy Monday!
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Pushing Snowbanks
Just have a couple things to share before I rush off to catch the next episode of our latest binge-watch. Cyndie and I randomly chose “Suspicion” on Apple TV+ a few days ago with no advance information about the show. We are nearing the end and find ourselves struggling to explain what seems like plot holes to us. We keep wanting to see another episode to find out if the things we are questioning end up making sense once all is revealed. Maybe not the best reason to get hooked on a story, but it works for us during winter months when Cyndie can’t do much else.
We are being warned by weather forecasters that seriously cold temperatures are headed our way this weekend and could linger for almost two weeks. Under Cyndie’s wise counsel, I put blankets on the horses yesterday while their coats were good and dry. Snow was predicted overnight and that contributed to my decision to put blankets on yesterday even though it was a nice sunny day.
I took some time in the afternoon to shovel the shoulder of a section of the driveway to push back the snowbank. It feels really rewarding to reclaim the full width of the pavement (on one side, at least) and to open the way for easy plowing of the next big snowfall.
We had a dusting of just under an inch of snow on Wednesday. I’m actually hoping there will be enough new snow out there this morning to justify plowing. I’m looking forward to seeing how much of an improvement clearing snow will be where I’ve pushed back the snowbank.
Since the shoveling is a little tedious, I had plenty of time to ponder how I could collaborate with my welder to create an offset plow blade that would hang off the back of the ATV to push the snowbank back a few feet. If it were even possible to do, the Grizzly would likely not have enough traction to knock back the snow on uphill portions of the drive. It is hard enough to push away snow with my front plow going up the hills.
An offset back blade could work on the downhill runs I bet, though.
Yesterday’s picture was of how the sun looked first thing in the morning through the low clouds. By evening, the setting sun was painting a much more vibrant set of colors.
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Mostly Fine
For the most part, we are good for now. The driveway is plowed, including the circle around the hay shed, allowing vehicle traffic. The weather looks to be settled for a few days of gray skies and temperatures below freezing. The thing that nags at me is that a change in either direction will produce complications I would prefer to avoid.
Here is a shot revealing the amount of pavement that has been lost to the mounds on the sides of the driveway that have gotten too high for my plow blade to be effective:
Ideally, I would plow the snow one blade width beyond the pavement to have room for the next big snowstorm.
Conversely, when temperatures climb above freezing and our snowpack begins to melt, I will be faced with a long period of water draining across the slope of pavement by the shop garage because I gave in and left a large amount of snow on the asphalt.
Water draining across that slope re-freezes most nights and becomes a real nuisance.
I suppose I could crank up the diesel tractor, scoop up the snow in the loader, and dump it on the downhill side of the pavement. I’m a little wary about the chains on the tires abusing our new asphalt. It’s like not wanting to see the first scratch in a new car’s paint.
More in the moment, this morning’s session with the horses was a delight in the magical frosty calm of a perfect winter day. After making it through the last storm without blankets, the herd seems content with their situation. They are all (mostly) dry and the footing is reasonable –not icy, not too deep or sticky.
When no vehicles were traveling past our place it was particularly calm and quiet. Not even a single neighboring dog could be heard making its usual announcement of existence.
“I’m here! It’s ME! Can you hear me barking over and over?”
After devouring their feed, the horses showed zero urgencies about switching to munching hay. There was nothing except a powerful sense of contentment.
I stood silently observing them for a few minutes before quietly making my departure toward the house for my breakfast.
For now, everything is perfectly fine.
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Beating Expectation
With 6″ of heavy new snow on the driveway and more falling yesterday morning, I figured I better plow before it got to be more snow than the ATV could push. While shoveling the front steps and walkway I discovered the snow was stickier than I’d expected, which threatened to make the plowing job too much for the Yamaha Grizzly.
Just as I suspected, the snow wasn’t rolling off the blade as fast as it was piling up in front of it. On the uphill climbs, it became too much to push and I had to back up to make a fresh start around the piles. The driveway was becoming a mess that I feared I wouldn’t be able to clear over the tall banks. I bought some time by focusing on clearing around our mailbox and at the start of the driveway. Then it was time to try making my way up the full length again.
The third time was the charm. I made incremental progress with each pass and was able to maintain a high enough speed that the sticky snow was finally flying off the plow blade by the end. I was surprised that I had been able to clear so much heavy snow as well as I ultimately did.
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The plowed portion continues to narrow compared to the full width of the pavement but it is wide enough for a vehicle. The old Grizzly deserves more respect than I was giving it.
I’ll give myself a little credit for being able to maintain forward progress as the ATV slid sideways against the weight of snow on the blade.
Around the middle of the day, we caught a break in precipitation that showed up on the radar as an isolated pocket surrounded by snow all around us.
As the hours wore on we received more snow but it was warm enough that most of it seemed to be melting on contact. Much of the driveway remained snow-free and very wet. Where it wasn’t clear to the pavement, another inch or two were getting added.
There remains plenty to clean up today and temperatures are expected to remain below freezing for a while so it will be a challenge shoveling what was soft yesterday but frozen solid now.
I’m feeling renewed sympathy for the people of Buffalo, NY, who had to dig out from under multiple feet of snow. It is getting hard for me to throw the shovels full over the growing piles along the edges. I don’t know how they have dealt with shoveling three or four times the amount I’m facing.
Maybe I’ll get lucky today and the level of difficulty shoveling will beat my expectations like the plowing did yesterday.
Wish I was feeling luckier than I actually do this morning.
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Relative Something 