Winter Is Here

November was a free month this year. Free in the sense that we could park the vehicles at the house and find or work with anything in the yard. While there was snow on the ground for the last week of November, it was not enough to prevent me from continuing to run the dogs with the ATV. All that changed on the first of December.

We got all the vehicles moved except the dog truck. It was the last one to be moved, and by the time we got to it, it was too late. So, it sits by the house until we can get the guy with the monster snow blower to clear a path out to the highway.

All this snow forced me to switch to the sled, but with the extra month on the ATV, the transition this year was a snap. Because the gates were open, the dogs were already accustomed to running the winter trail, and I did not have to reduce my team size for the first sled run. Because trucks and ATVs had been driving on the trail, there was a hard packed base underneath the new snow. The new snow amounted to two feet or so, which gave us some tremendous drifts to flounder through in the windy spots, but the dogs did an admirable job of navigating across the open field.