April 27, 2014 Will IT Never END!?

April 25th was a snowy day.  We got over a foot of heavy snow.  The roads, driveways, even the deer yard......had just been getting to the point of drying out and snow free, almost.  It was almost to the point of putting on decent shoes to go outside.  Now.......it's the knee high rubber boots!  Yes, it's that bad.  I have finicky feet so I do not enjoy wearing rubber boots.....at all!
On the surface, it looks really pretty out.  It is still snowing pretty hard in this photo, by the way.  But, you notice how all the tree tops are leaning to the east.  Well, by the end of the day.....many of those tree tops were missing.  Toby and I did all our walks for the day down the driveway and on the Moose Valley Road.  The first one, in particular, did not impress him.  Being a long haired golden retriever, he came back to the house with baseball sized snowballs hanging all over him.  Ugh!

I am standing on the Moose Valley Road here.....looking at one of the neighbors driveways.  Isn't that just lovely.  How would you like to plow snow on that .....today?

Here is a view of me looking up another driveway.  I am standing on the MVR again, here.  Notice the tipping spruces.  The willows and alders were taking a beating too.  However, spruce, balsam and jackpine seemed to get the worst of it.  Later on in the morning, more of the willows were collapsing in full clumps, right to the ground.  The snow, in most cases, only took the tops off of the spruce.  In a few cases, the smaller spruce or balsams snapped right off in the middle.  I know that I, for one, am going to have a LOT of chainsaw work to do when the ground bares off.  I will have to cut them into workable sizes to put in the chipper and I am going to be busy. 

In some cases, big spruce went down across the road.  One such tree went down on the corner near another neighbor.  After having fed the deer and was out for a walk with Toby, I saw the plow down on the corner.  Well....it was snowing so hard the visibility was terrible.  I thought I could see a body out there doing something.  But, I couldn't tell what exactly.  After quite a while, it turned around and went back down the road.  So, later I found out that a huge spruce had gone across the road and the truck plow couldn't handle it.  Evidently, he doesn't carry a chainsaw.  Usually, this road is plowed by a grader.  That guy was on vacation.  Quite a lot later in the day, my neighbor on the other side of me plowed out his driveway to get ready to take a trip.  Then......guess what.....road isn't plowed.  So, he goes plowing down the road until he gets to the tree.   And then....guess what!  He has to try and turn that plow truck of his around in all that wet heavy snow so he can go home and get his chainsaw.  After a fashion, he sawed out the tree and got it off the road.  But, until then, no one on this end of the valley had ventured anywhere.  Over a foot of that kind of heavy snow is hard to handle and easy to get stuck in if you do anything but drive straight forward. 

Here is another driveway.  Again, you see a lot of trees out over the driving area. 

Here is another view on the MVR showing a bunch of the willow bent over the ditch.  Some of these actually did stand up again.  But, many are history.                                                                               

Here are a few more crooked spruce.  Luckily, these ones didn't break off and land on the caged apple trees.  The cages and fence around the garden were just about completely solid snow.  It did look kind of neat.  However, some of them got so heavy they tipped over with the trees in them going over in them.  Then, we had to get out there and get them up before the deer ate off the whole tops of them.  One cage by our pond with a cedar in it had a deer nudging the cage all over the place.  It had fallen on her trail to the water hole and she wanted that thing out of her way so she could get a drink.  That was  rather humorous to watch.  However, we got down there and got that fixed too.                                     

    Here are a bunch of the deer wondering what we are up to.  They were sleeping all over the middle of the yard today.  Most of the next day they did the same.  The wet slop was falling off the trees in loud plops and they didn't appreciate being under it.  Not to mention the falling tops.
This storm definitely ruined more tree tops, up here, than any storm I've seen.  I just shake my head every time I go out and find so many more down.  Unbelievable.
I do hope it is soon done with the late season snow storms.  Neither I nor the critters need any more.
                 

I will leave you with some of the juncos enjoying the heated bird bath.  There were hundreds of birds out here.  Seems a big late season storm is just the thing to bring them all in.
Sorry about the writing all over the place.  It was fine.  Then, I put in the second vertical photo and it went nuts.  Then, a couple of horizontals and it straightened out again.  Go figure!