Posts Tagged ‘snow’
Snow Maybe
It’s close. We can see it on the weather radar. Our county is under a Winter Weather Advisory today as a snow system is slowly making its way across our region from west to east. It appears that the bulk of the impact will be to our south, which puts us in the “maybe” category regarding the amount of accumulated snow we will need to shovel or plow.
Just in case it piles up, I spent some time yesterday pulling the plow blade from the back of the garage and getting it mounted on the Grizzly.
It took ‘some time’ because the long arms of the mounting frame, combined with the weight and width of the blade, make it rather unwieldy to maneuver.
The real problem lies in the fact that I can almost move it sufficiently all on my own, so I am too often inclined to try. Yesterday’s effort bordered on ridiculous and held potential for several troublesome failures as I wrestled it around a variety of obstacles to get it to the front of the ATV. Ultimately, I accomplished it without incident.
Once there, I needed to envision a creative way to connect the hook and winch cable that lifts the blade, since the cobbled method from last winter proved to be ill-advised. I’m not confident that my latest iteration will be adequate, but it’s a start.
If history serves as a guide, I will be forced to revise the setup when it fails in the dark, when it is cold, and I am in the middle of a huge plowing effort. That’s always a great time to work on kludged solutions.
Since yesterday’s weather was a perfect calm before the storm type of day, I decided to move a fresh batch of bales from the hay shed to the barn. Upon opening the big door of the hay shed, the aroma of moldy hay was becoming too prominent to ignore.
Our several-year-old ploy of leaving old bales as a base layer on which we stack new hay needs a change. Cyndie swept down cobwebs while we contemplated the effort it will take to remove the nasty bales.
The first challenge will be that the twine will likely have degraded to a point of failure when we try to pick up the bales. The second challenge is where we will dispose of the moldy mass. I may or may not dabble in the project while beautiful flakes are floating down this afternoon.
Light was keeping an eye on the distant horizon between mouthfuls of her feed this morning. The insulating property of her winter growth is visible in the snow that doesn’t melt on her back.
She looks so gorgeous, it’s hard to fathom how skinny she was when rescued as a starving momma in a kill pen in Kansas years back. The tips of her mane look like she has them colored at some fancy salon.
These horses deserve to be fed the best hay we can find, and to keep it stored in a way that keeps it fresh until the last bottom bale is reached.
Cleaning the hay shed today will be a labor of love.
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Feeling (C)old
Three days ago, our temperatures were around 80°F. Welcome to spring in the Northland. That unseasonal warmth brought an overnight storm with heavy rain and loads of lightning and thunder. Most of the day yesterday dragged on with a dreary occasional mist and temps hovering in the very chilly mid-30s.
Around dinnertime, the temperature dropped below freezing.
Just 47 minutes later, it looked like this outside:
Hot and cold weather always bounces back and forth this time of year, so we should be well-adjusted to coping with the changes, but the return of wintery chills and snow never fails to feel like an undeserved punishment.
It’s the final day of March. I could hope that this is the last blanketing of snow we will get for the season, but ever since going through the extreme experience of receiving 18 inches of snow on May 2nd, 2013, I won’t assume we are in the clear until the calendar flips to June.
Cyndie tried convincing Mia to wear a light blanket for protection against the wetness, but Mia wasn’t interested. I figure she didn’t want to look different than the other Mares. All four of them seem to be coping just fine, as they almost always do.
I’ve got coping skills of my own that I’ve been executing. Lounging in the recliner by the fireplace, eating more than I should, adding a few inches and pounds of insulation around my middle, and napping whenever my tired eyes keep trying to stay closed. It feels an awful lot like my impression of what getting old must be like.
My initiative to maintain an exercise routine for back health and strong core muscles has done a disappearing act. Now in my mid-60s, I seem to have experienced a shift of my own from hot to cold. My morning workouts now tend to involve more cerebral pursuits like Wordle, Strands, and Connections in the NY Times games suite and sporadic stabs at Words With Friends competitions.
My aging is getting more obvious now that mental exercise has become just as tiring as my physical workouts once were.
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Solitary Refinement
In the middle of my solo escape to the lake, I find myself thinking about how I can most fully absorb the pleasures of these agenda-less days. When I am tasked daily at home with duties, the dream of having nothing pressing me into an activity grows and grows. I long to have no reason to get out of bed and to pick and choose what comes next by whim instead of by the hour on the clock. An hour, by the way, that has once again shifted disorientingly forward to DST overnight. Ugh, I say, and I don’t even have any schedule that needs to be upheld today.
Looking back on the already vanished last two days of luxurious solo pursuits, I fear the benefits of getting what I so dearly wanted are disappearing without my fully appreciating the greatness of the moments. Today, I plan to see if I can improve on that perception.
There is a herd of deer wandering the grounds that I have enjoyed seeing each day. I counted seven yesterday in the middle of a sunny afternoon. From the obvious pattern of their heavily traveled hoof prints in the snow, it appears they have a much more set agenda than I do.
I made my way to our mini labyrinth in the woods and reclaimed the pathway with my own footprints. There was no sign of wildlife traffic in that area.
No, the deer have been walking right past the house along the ridge above the lake. One or two of them had approached the house to nibble on the branches of one of the landscape shrubs.
I took a few pictures on my walk yesterday morning when the temperature was still below freezing. There was a striking difference in the texture of the snow where shade had kept it all wonderfully powdery, as opposed to the hard crust more prominent everywhere else.
Later in the day, the clouds broke up, and the sun kicked up the amount of melting significantly.
My slow, aimless wandering was one of the divine pleasures I want to deeply appreciate in its contrast to strolling along with Asher, which is more my norm.
Oh, my. Look at the hour. How can it be this late already? Oh, yeah. That.
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Never Simple
We hadn’t had a problem with the horse waterer in the paddocks freezing up on us again for enough days in a row that I stopped thinking about it. I still regularly glance toward it to see if there is liquid water in the pans, but I haven’t been lifting the cover to press the float and verify water flows. Temperatures were in the teens yesterday, but there was no direct sunshine.
During the afternoon feeding, I found the pans dry and immediately set about trying to warm the lines with my hands while Cyndie hustled back to the house to heat a kettle of water to pour over the tubing. It has worked simply enough to solve the problem each time it occurred the last times we’ve dealt with this. Of course, since it stopped happening, I didn’t pursue buying a new heat tape for that line. D’oh!
Since we weren’t prepared to be doing this, and our latest snowstorm was just getting underway, afternoon chores were suddenly getting complicated. While I was waiting at the waterer for Cyndie to return, Mia came down from her feed bucket looking to get a drink. It’s an awful feeling to disappoint a horse that just wants a drink of water.
When Cyndie popped out of the barn with the thermos, she was also bringing some water in a scoop she planned to use to clean the waterer. Mia stuck her snout in the scoop and guzzled what she could get out of it. I took the thermos, and Cyndie went in to fill another bucket with water for Mia. It didn’t take long at all for me to get the waterer flowing again.
If the horses keep drinking from it, the line is less likely to freeze at these relatively moderate temperatures simply because of the flowing water that refills it. If there is no flow, freezing occurs. We’ll be bringing hot water with us at the morning feeding.
Then I’ll start clearing snow. Just two days ago, I scraped the nuisance trace of snow off the pavement up by the house.
It’s all buried again now.
One more thing that’s not simple is the trick of prey surviving the threats of predators. We suspect that friendly pigeon we started calling “Plucky” may have fallen victim to a prowling cat or fox. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left, but the wing feathers were a dark color.
The predator got a meal for another day.
Life goes on. Cyndie and I are headed to a somewhat rare gathering of my Hays siblings today for an afternoon of catching up on each others’ stories. It’s my chance to tell them all the things I don’t write in this space.
Later tonight, I hope to take in a little sports spectating in the form of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament game between the USA and Canada. Hockey rivalry much? I have a feeling this one won’t simply be just any old tournament hockey game, given the current state of government affairs.
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White Stuff
Overnight last night, we received more of that white stuff from the sky. Probably enough that I will feel justified in firing up the Grizzly ATV to plow the driveway. Our other grizzly took on a shocked look at the latest batch of precipitation.
Possibly because the earlier flakes got covered with an icy drizzle. It created a crust over the surfaces that was just enough to make walking annoying because it caught the toe of my boot every few steps. There are enough trip hazards in our landscape that I don’t welcome the addition of any more of them. I’ve noticed a demeaning increase in my tendency to hit the ground over the last few years when my foot catches on unseen obstructions.
For some reason, those occasions are matched by an equivalent increase in F-bombs taking flight in reactionary shock.
The horses look like they stood out in the weather all night and then rolled around to get as wet and icy as possible. There is probably a word for the blocks of packed snow that build up and then get ejected from the bottom of their hooves. They are scattered everywhere around the paddocks. The series of days with this slowly accumulating snow at the temperatures we’ve had seems to keep the conditions right at the level that is prime for these to form.
Asher and I picked a spot to position the trail cam (which has been in storage [with batteries still in it. Boo!] for too long), hoping to identify what animal has been using an old downed tree trunk in our woods for its toilet. My scat-identifying skills have me thinking it looks like either a human or a dog as big or bigger than Asher. In reality, based on likely creatures traveling in that part of the forest, it’s a coyote, fox, or really large raccoon. Whatever it is, the amount of scat reveals this is a regular occurrence and not just an animal that happened to be wandering past.
There were no tracks in the fresh coating of white stuff this morning, so I didn’t check the memory card for images. New tracks in the snow will tell me when it’s time to check. You can be sure I will provide a full report as soon as we get some results. Heck, you’d think the tracks would give me the information I need to identify the culprit.
I’m about as good at identifying paw prints as I am with scat.
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As Expected
The National Weather Service warnings were spot-on for our area yesterday. Asher and I headed out for the morning walk into the snowstorm, fully prepared for the worst. It wasn’t the most difficult of conditions we’ve faced, but it was challenging. My legs got a good workout trying to keep up with Asher as he pranced through the snow with little in the way of extra effort.
There was just enough snow to make my trudging in stiff boots much less efficient.
The horses looked like they had chosen to spend the night outside the protection of the overhang despite the heavy precipitation.
There was enough snow blown into those spaces that it probably didn’t matter either way. The wind was blowing from the wrong direction for the overhang to provide its best shelter from the elements.
I spent much of the day plowing and shoveling. Got the driveway cleared just as Cyndie was pulling in, which was nice for both of us. The road didn’t get plowed until late afternoon. It knocked the mailbox off its base, which surprised me. I thought it was dry enough snow it wouldn’t pack such a punch.
I guess not everything went as expected.
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Nuisance Amounts
So far this winter (even though winter solstice is still nine days away), we have only been receiving what I call nuisance amounts of snowfall. It’s barely enough to justify shoveling, yet too much to leave on steps and walkways. Last week, when Asher and I got caught in that epic snow-burst, we couldn’t see the barn. In the end, so little snow accumulated that it was all gone two days later.
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Yesterday morning, I spent a few minutes clearing the driveway closest to the house with a shovel.
I like having the cleaner pavement, but that minimal covering of snow isn’t enough to deserve firing up the ATV to plow, and I’m not inclined to push the shovel the rest of the length of the driveway to the road. I saw the township plow go by on our road, so I carried a shovel when walking Asher. That big blade didn’t throw up enough snow to make any difference.
I shoveled what little there was anyway. So now the top and the bottom of our driveway are cleared, and the middle is just a series of tire tracks and footprints until we get enough sun to evaporate whatever snow remains.
Since the temperature was forecast to drop precipitously overnight, I made sure the horses had plenty of good hay to stoke their internal furnaces. They are decidedly picky about one of the batches of bales we’ve been trying to use up on them, and they regularly ignore any amount that we mix into the hay nets. I chose to dump some of those dregs out on the ground where we are building a hay path for traction in advance of future icy conditions. That way, I could fill the bag exclusively with hay they prefer.
What’s the first thing that happens?
Mia comes over and starts eating the hay I dumped out.
I don’t blame her. Free of the netting, she can dive in and more easily scrounge out any desired nibbles mixed in with the stringy grasses she doesn’t like. She probably thinks of them as “nuisance amounts.”
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Paw Prints
As a result of the fraction of an inch of snow coating surfaces outside, we get new opportunities each morning to see where all the nocturnal visitors have tread around our grounds. The other day, I found some decent-sized canine prints on Paddock Lake that could easily have been a coyote passing through.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that the neighbor’s cat that practically lives on our property might be polydactyl. This morning there were some very clear prints on the driveway that revealed I was probably seeing double.
What I was seeing in most cases is the result of the hind paw landing in the same spot as a front one. When they don’t align so closely, it becomes much easier to see what’s happening.
What I haven’t been seeing in numbers like years past are hoof prints from deer. Maybe that explains why we saw so few hunters in the woods around us this year. No deer, no reason to hunt.
If the weather forecast proves accurate, we will probably lose what little snow cover we’ve got by the end of the weekend.
Then it returns to Asher being the only one to know where the critters have traveled in the hours before we show up on our morning walks. When tracks are fresh, he becomes maniacally obsessive about urgently following the scent. I don’t remember seeing “bloodhound” in the list of breeds identified by his DNA, but it sure seems like he thinks he is one sometimes.
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His Idea
Asher was insistent. He wanted me to take him outside. I wasn’t interested in venturing out into the cold wind, but Asher persisted long enough to defeat my resistance. When I got out of the recliner to get suited up against the elements, I caught a glimpse of a surprising amount of falling snow.
Really, dog? I’m not sure he even noticed how hard it was snowing. His primary interest continues to be getting to the barn to snatch up pigeons that behave too lackadaisical in his presence for their own good. He has such a one-track mind about catching pigeons lately that he doesn’t seem to notice how many walks we take where I don’t let him go to the barn.
His hope is unfazed. He veers toward the barn at every opportunity until his leash snugs as I continue walking straight ahead.
When we got down by the labyrinth, the falling snow was pretty and it was fun to be out in it.
I took a chance at capturing the fresh snow starting to cling to the tops of the seedheads of the Japanese tall grass, trying to lean with it as the wind swung it to and fro.
A moment later, the precipitation kicked up a notch and I noticed I couldn’t see the barn when we turned the corner on the path around the back pasture fence.
Asher picked up his pace a bit and pulled me along as the thick blowing snow pelted us. Suddenly, I got the impression I was on more than just a figurative expedition. This walk was becoming a literal expedition. I hoped we would make it back to some shelter before either of us perished.
When we reached the mailbox, I grabbed the three envelopes we’d received and didn’t resist when Asher chose to take the driveway instead of continuing along the north loop trail. He picked up his pace again, and I was able to slide my boots a short distance on the icy pavement as he pulled me along.
He let me stop him for a moment as I tried to get a photo of the tall grass by the shop garage, but I don’t think he was happy about it.
“It was your idea to go out in this,” I told him.
“Can we go back in the house now, Dad?”
We made it back to the front door before either of us succumbed to the elements of this blustery snow burst, barely worse for the wear. Thankfully, Asher was much more agreeable about lolling about indoors with me for the rest of the afternoon.
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Forest Labyrinth
With few hints revealing the intended course of our forest labyrinth at Wildwood, Cyndie and I navigated our way around the circles and found the stones in the center undisturbed.
If we want this to remain usable throughout the winter, we’re going to need to place more rocks to define the route for others to see.
I really like that we were able to lay this out so the path winds around mature trees and travels across flat rocks that fill a shallow ravine. There was just enough snow cover to make it easily walkable, but it was tricky to know when we were on the intended pathway.
I liked the way the snow had shaped up around these stones. When I looked at the image on my computer, it struck me how much that top one looked like a baked potato. Didn’t notice that when looking directly at them.
We drove home in the afternoon and found a similar amount of light snow covering our property as there was up north. The horses all looked well and the barn appeared orderly after several days of a volunteer doing the feedings for us.
I’m happy to report, no evidence of mice was found in drawers or bedding in the house at home.
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Relative Something 