Loud Blowing Snowstorms

I am unable to post pictures at the moment, so my kind, patient readers will have to be content with text. Last week we were treated to loud blowing snowstorms every day. In fact, a 40 mile stretch of the highway that runs by my house was closed. This is generally due to poor visibility or the inability of the plows to keep up with the drifting snow.

The highway closure forced my husband to stay with some coworkers overnight since he could not come home. We were both going to go to a sled dog race last weekend, but he could not get home in time, so I went by myself. In my next post, I will tell you all about the race. It was quite the chore getting the snow blown or shoveled out enough to get my dogtruck onto the highway. Luckily they had reopened the highway before I needed to leave.

One chore that had to be done before I left was to lift up each and every doghouse on top of the drifts. The amount of new snow and drifting meant that the houses would have disappeared from sight before I returned from the race if I did not raise them all at the very last minute before leaving.

White, White, Everywhere

I look out my window and see nothing but white, except for my trees, dimly seen through the blowing snow. We have been getting a lot of snow and wind this week and last. The level in my yard is close to two feet now. This is the settled amount, not how much has actually fallen, which is probably closer to four feet.

Every morning I snowshoe out my path to the kennel, the path to the highway, and the path from the kennel to the snowmobile trail. This week I have found that these paths are completely drifted over after I have had my breakfast and gone back outside to actually use them. This year I have marked my paths with a few stakes so that I will know exactly where to step to stay on top of the packed surface underneath.

The good news is that I have made light work of keeping the dog houses lifted up on top of the snow. Lifting all the houses every other day, or even every three or four days, has been sufficient to keep them all above board, and the task is easy enough to complete in less than an hour.

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.