Snow, Snow and More Snow

You all know what snow is - that's that white stuff that comes to cover the ground every winter for most of you, but how much thought do you give it, really? Warm days and cold night can cause snow to melt and then freeze, making your streets and highways slippery and dangerous. Many cities keep fleets of snow removal equipment, massive snow-blowers, plows and dump trucks. Even cities in Alaska have such equipment. I really don't know all that much about how cities deal with the snow aside from what I've seen, but out here we don't have any of that equipment.

Many of us out here have some sort of groomer for making our trails nice and smooth, but still there is no snow removal involved, it is merely rearranged. There are many different styles of snow groomers, but in general they are a long piece of construction with some sort of cross-piece in the middle and at both ends for stability. The center cross-piece can have some sort of reinforcement - one we used to have had a heavy metal blade. What these contraptions do is scrape snow off high spots and drop it into low spots along the trail, and in the even that you have finally scraped all the high spots down, the snow then filters over the grooming board and onto the trail behind, of course by that time, it's quitting time - there's no real point in grooming the trail any further.

As our need for a smooth trail diminished, we traded off our long groomer. Now, our biggest concern is a smooth runway so we use a drag of some sort. Most of the time we borrow our neighbor's old steel bed-springs. It's mostly his runway and it works quite well. Our keeping it packed and groomed allows him to come and go freely whenever he wants so he doesn't begrudge us it's use.

Well that's trails and the runway, but what about the rest of the yard? The yard, like all the rest of the trail gets packed, either by the snowmachine driving round and round the house or by foot as I make at least one trip a day to the woodshed - no need to mention the outhouse. Outside of that, there's the assorted roofs.

Our generator shed is our greatest concern because it's the flattest roof we have. It is slanted but since there's no heat to help, the snow will never slide - not until we start running the diesel generator again sometime in the spring when it gets above freezing for the greater part of the day.

The woodshed is the next roof we worry about. Though build sturdier, there's no point in pushing luck and with mineral paper on top, it'll never slide. If we get some really heavy snow, I have to get up there and shovel it all off.

Our bedroom roof is also nearly flat but since the house is heated, the snow up there generally creeps off by itself, so aside from keeping an eye on it, I don't worry about it much.

The task of shoveling roofs is mostly decided by what kind of snow we are getting. Have you ever gone outside after a nice fresh snowfall and thought, "I'm going to make a snowman today."? When you have lots of snow every winter, it's something kids love to do. Now you all know how to make a good snowman. You scoop up a big two-fister of snow and start making it bigger, pretty soon you're rolling this big ball around and watching it get even bigger by the moment. But have you ever tried and had the snow just sift away between your fingers? Refusing to make a ball without a lot of force and maybe even the heat from your bare hands? This is dry snow, and dry snow doesn't pack worth a darn. It also doesn't weigh much and that's because, though it's wet and white, there's not really much water there. It's the nice big fat snowflakes that make the great snowmen.

To give you a little perspective, if you've not read earlier posts, I collect snow in buckets to melt for washing and drinking water. Nice wet snow packed into a bucket generally gives me about a half a bucket of water. So far this year the snow has been really quite dry and I'm only getting a little more than a quarter of a bucket worth of water. So, because the snow this winter (so far) is so dry, I'm not worrying about shoveling roofs (yet).

In my totally non-professional opinion, we are having something of a drought. Yeah, there's snow, and yeah there's rain in the summer. Everything is green and growing healthy, but once was the time when ten feet of snow wasn't unheard of. I've seen it twice in my time out here. I'd say average (since I've been here) is around five feet of snow. I think we're a little behind here, though I don't know what the professionals say. There's only around two feet of settled snow out there now and the temperature has been bitter cold for a long time, far longer than normal (again in my opinion), hence the dry snow.

When the temperature drops, the air can't hold as much moisture. That moisture squeezed out of the air shows up as frost coating most any surface - it can leave the trees looking really quite beautiful. Therefore, when it warms up, suddenly there's room for moisture and, wallah, snow, very dry snow. Eh, I probably have it all wrong but that's what it seems like. All I know is, when it goes from a long term of minus teen something to a degree or two above zero Fahrenheit and then it dumps two feet of snow, it's always really dry. The best snowman snow falls when it's much closer to freezing if not slightly above.

So what do you do with snow?

Tracking

I have this bad habit. The army tried to break me of it, but in truth, they didn't do a very good job. I watch where I walk, and by association I watch the ground all around. Because of that habit, I notice tracks. I like to think I can identify quite a few tracks. I've got a really rather good book with several nice drawings.

There's always been one puzzle rattling around in the back of my mind. Ever since I was a kid, I wondered about something. Do you remember the show, Daniel Boone? There was this one episode where an Indian woman was teaching Daniel's son (I think) how to track. While the boy's eyes were closed she walked around the woodpile. As she walked around the pile, she picked up a log in one hand, switched it to her other hand, and then replaced it on the pile. Of course the first thing the boy said when he told her what she'd done was "So, you walked around the woodpile, so what." or something of that nature. But that wasn't good enough. Looking closer at her tracks, he could tell she'd picked up something, he could tell when she switched hands, and he could tell when she put it back down. I always wondered how that was possible. It has been a mystery that has been hanging onto a tiny corner in the back of my brain for all these years.

Well, I think I've figured it out. I love snow, especially the packable kind. It lets me see tracks clearly. Did you know that if you're carrying something heavy in one hand, no matter how carefully balanced you are, both feet point toward the load to some degree. A tiny detail I didn't know. Now a years old mystery has found an answer.

In other tracking news. The other day, on my walks down to pack the runway, I think I saw martin tracks. The spacing was about the same as what a cat might make but the feet were like four times the size of a cat's feet and because of that, the tracks sank only a couple inches in the fresh snow.

I also saw the tracks of a young moose - very young, though not too young to be on his own. Normally he'd be hanging around his momma for another year but he wouldn't be dependent on her for food. I wonder what happened to her. But such is life and he has a good chance of making it. There's not many wolves or coyotes around here and he wasn't having any trouble finding something to eat - the snow isn't that deep.