First of spring or last of winter?

It's been cold here. Not nearly as bitter as the weather in the northeast, but we've had lows in the teens and high in the low 30s for the last couple of days. The ground is frozen hard, but we have no snow. (It's typical around here not to get snow until January.)

Yesterday afternoon, I finished cleaning the barn and was coming back into the house when I heard an unexpected sound: A robin's call. I looked up and saw the culprit in one of our yard trees under a gibbous moon.

Robins in winter are rare, but not unheard of. It was puffed up against the cold, and its red breast caught the glow of the afternoon sun.

Was this the last robin of winter or the first robin of spring?

No idea. Maybe this bird knows something we don't.

Stormy weather and radio drama

Well, yesterday's windstorm has come and gone. Rather to our surprise, we only lost power for about eight hours.

Don was listening to the radio drama on the sheriff's scanner, and let me tell you, there was mayhem all over the region. Every law enforcement officer, emergency response personnel, and power company lineman was on duty, trying to keep ahead of the chaos. There were trees and power lines down everywhere. Many roads were additionally blocked by falling rocks.

"Well, it's a good time for a little day drinking," joked Older Daughter at 7:45 am, putting a dollop of Irish cream in her hot chocolate. 

The wind was positively insane. We expected trees down all over the place, but the only damage we noticed on our property was a tree toppled over in our tiny grove of black hawthorn.

The same couldn't be said for a neighbor, who had a massive pine come down just behind his pickup truck, blocking him in. Miraculously his vehicle escaped all but minor scratches, but he said it took him four hours to chainsaw up the tree enough to clear the blockage.

During the day, when Older Daughter's side of the house was getting chilly, she opened the connecting door and let Frumpkin into the main part of the house, where the woodstove kept things cozy. Darcy – who hates cats – understands this is one cat towards whom he must be respectful. He's a Good Boi, is Darcy.

Frumpkin was very curious about the Christmas tree.

Even though the wind was still shrieking, somehow the hard-working linemen managed to get our power back on by mid-afternoon.

Our pastor called in the evening to check in on us. Even though he and his family are at a higher elevation and had stronger winds, their power had stayed on and they were fine. However he told us an older couple in our church had part of their roof torn off. Another family had something like 40+ trees come down on their property, taking out most of the fences and causing them to scramble to contain livestock. They're still without power and are staying with our pastor for a few days.

Don and I told our pastor we're available to help re-shingle roofs or re-string fences as necessary. At this point everyone is still assessing damage, so we'll find out more in the next couple of days.

We have snow and rain moving in today and tomorrow, with wind (not as strong) predicted for tonight. You can see some snow flurries in front of the mountains below.

I guess it's winter.

La Niña

A reader made a tongue-in-cheek observation about my last post, "Quantities of Quail," observing: "Tell-tale sign of long snowy winter!!"

Tongue-in-cheek or not, winter has been on our minds a lot lately. Last week, Don read an article on how a La Niña event might cause a snowier-than-usual winter across the northern U.S.

The trouble with many winter forecast predictions is that Idaho falls into something of a dead zone. There are predictions for the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Atlantic coast, the mid-Atlantic Mountains, the Great Lakes region, the Northern Plains, and other regional designations ... but none of them really cover the "Inland Northwest," which is what we are. The Pacific Northwest tends to "stop" east of the Cascades, and the Northern Plains doesn't include anything west of the Bitterroots, so our specific area gets glossed over quite a bit.

However for the La Niña forecast, it specifically did include Idaho: "Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho) usually turns wetter than average, with strong storms and heavy mountain snow."

The Farmer's Almanac confirms the prediction: "The season’s coldest temperatures will be found from the Northern Plains to New England. Readers in the Northwest should also prepare for a cold winter, especially in Idaho and Washington."

So whether the weather can be predicted by the quantities of quail, or the quantity of wild fruit, or the thickness of the stripes on woolly-bear caterpillars, or La Niña, or any other index, we're putting up firewood.

Preparing for winter

We had a day of rain predicted today (Thursday), so yesterday Don and I did a lot of battening down. But it wasn't just battening down for rain; it was the precursor of battening down for winter. In fact, winter has been more on our minds lately after Don "called fall" this week.

Let me back up a bit to explain why this is important to us. In fact, let me back up all the way to  2003, when we first moved from southwest Oregon to north Idaho. We moved in June, which meant the weather was lovely. We had about five months, perhaps more, to anticipate what lay in store for us over the cold months. And here's the thing: Depending on whom we talked to, the winters were either "not bad" or they were horrible. Which was it?

Keep in mind we were far more rural in Idaho than we were in Oregon. With two small children (five and seven at the time), we knew we didn't want to risk their health or safety by not being ready for what, conceivably, could be a hard winter.

So we made a decision: By October, we would be prepared to be snowed in for three months. This meant we would have enough people food, pet food, and livestock food so we wouldn't have to go to the store for three months, and enough firewood to stay warm. Could we do it?

Yes we could, and we did. And boy, did it pay off.

The first couple of winters were fine. We got snow, sure; but it wasn't much and it wasn't bad. Were we overreacting by our "snowed in for three months" rule?

And then the winters of 2005/6 and 2006/7 hit like a ton of bricks. During the former, we had tons of snow. During the latter we had tons of snow and high winds. Combined, they left something of a psychic scar that made us never underestimate the power of winter. Ever.

The winter of 2006/7, we probably got five feet of snow (in areas north of us, apparently it was upwards of 12 feet). While this may sound like no big deal for battle-hardened Minnesotans, the two-mile dirt road we lived on at the time was not county-maintained, so it was up to the neighbors to keep it open. The combined efforts of everyone's mishmash of tractors, pickup truck plow blades, and (at times) snow shovels worked – kinda – but it was constant and brutal work and wasn't always effective.

While we weren't snowed in for three months, we got close. That second harsh winter – when heavy snowfall combined with high winds meant our road was closed under incredibly deep drifts – our remote neighborhood fell into a pattern: Storms came at about weekly intervals that, for whatever reason, always came in on weekends. It took about six days to clear the road (no exaggeration). If a storm came in over the weekend, then we were able to get the road opened by about Friday. Everyone would pour out of their homes, dash into town for mail, groceries, and errands, and make it home just in time for another blizzard to close the road.

This happened over and over and over and OVER. Those who worked away from home had to make endless excuses to their bosses. Many had no option except to work remotely. One person who normally commuted to a city job an hour away had to stay with a coworker for a few weeks because otherwise she would miss too much work. One family whose kids attended the public schools simply couldn't make it out.

Keep in mind these winter conditions also meant commercial roads were also impacted. Sections of a major highway were drifted shut numerous times that winter, so trucks were unable to deliver food, mail, hardware, or other items. Several times that winter, both restaurants and the grocery store in town were closed, either because of a lack of supplies or because employees couldn't make it to work. The local school district took a lot of snow days during those two winters.

Meanwhile our 300-foot driveway drifted shut so many times that after a few storms, there was literally nowhere else to put snow. The smartest thing we did was park our car at the end of the driveway before one of the blizzards. For the next two months, we snowshoed to and from the car, transporting the children (along with mail and groceries) on a hay sled. Had we not parked the car at the end of the driveway, we – literally – would not have been able to leave the house for eight weeks running. As it was, we had to shovel the car out after each blizzard.

I remember after one particularly nasty storm, a heroic neighbor who lived about a mile away – and who was a heavy equipment operator – got busy trying to clear one heavily drifted quarter-mile section of road not far from our house. He didn't own a snow blower, so he used his good-sized bulldozer to push snow. It took him EIGHT HOURS of hard work to get that one quarter-mile section of road opened, and by the end of it we had nine-foot canyon walls of snow along the sides. (To this day, I regret I never took a photo – it was in the days before I owned a pocket camera.)

For these reasons, we've never relaxed our "snowed in for three months" rule when it comes to approaching winter. In Idaho, you just never know.

Anyway, this is a long explanation of why we're starting to think about getting ready. Will it be an abnormally harsh winter? Don has never "called fall" this early before.

Don read something interesting a couple weeks ago about how global weather patterns are being impacted by one of the greatest natural disasters no one has ever heard of: The Hunga Tonga underwater volcanic explosion that occurred in January of 2022.

This event was spectacularly enormous, "bigger than any other modern volcanic eruption, even bigger than Mount Pinatubo and possibly Krakatoa," according to this article. "The erupting lava instantly vaporized fantastic, unimaginable amounts of sea water, which billowed into the atmosphere, changing the water composition of Earth’s atmosphere and heating it up for years. In just a few days, the superheated water from the Hunga Tonga eruption blanketed the entire globe, pole to pole, East to West. ... Current estimates [for the amount of water blasted into the stratosphere] are three times higher than initially thought: scientists now believe it was closer to 150,000 metric tons, or approximately 40 trillion gallons of superheated water instantly injected into the atmosphere." Scientists expect the effects to persist globally for a long, long time.

So yeah, a hard winter is not outside the realm of possibility.

Therefore yesterday was a day of miscellaneous battening-down chores. It started with a long-overdue repair of a couple of flat tires. Not even flat; utterly destroyed. One tire was on a small trailer we haven't been able to use for some time; and the other, crucially, was on our log splitter.

We have a bunch of wood to split...

...including rounds far too large to use our manual splitter.

Don was able to get the new tire installed. Now the splitter can be moved to where we need it to go.

Time's a-wastin'. We have to get the winter's firewood put up.

Other miscellaneous chores included re-stacking and re-tarping a pile of lumber...

...scrubbing out and refilling the cow's water tank...

...and moving the last of the older round bales into the barn. (The newer hay bales are stacked and tarped in the front driveway; we'll be moving them to the back, nearer the barn, before the snow flies.)

We still have lots to do before winter, including (hopefully) building an awning on the back of the barn to offer more shelter for the livestock this winter.

If it will be a hard winter, we want to be ready for it.

Trail of quail

Perhaps it's because I've been filling the bird feeder over the cold months, but we've had a LOT of quail hanging around over the winter.

Their favorite refuge is a pile of brush near the house. Originally we had plans to chip this pile, but instead we might keep it there. It offers refuge against both terrestrial and aerial predators for the quail as well as other birds.

The quail have hung around the "front porch" of this brush pile for months now.

The funny thing is, the quail are gathering in unprecedented numbers

The other day I looked down and saw a whole bunch of quail on the road.

The flock grew and swelled until there were dozens, maybe over 100, quail.

And then they all marched down the road as if following an order.

Yes, a veritable trail of quail.

The harsh reality of life in winter

Older Daughter was working in the kitchen the other day when she glanced out the window just in time to see a bird fall off a tree trunk into the snow.

At first she was inclined to think it was funny – clumsy bird! – but it soon became apparent the bird was stuck in the snow. I donned boots and waded out to free it.

The bird was a red-shafted flicker, and it was indeed stuck in the snow. Or ... something.

Did it have a broken leg? A broken wing? Whatever the issue, it was serious.

I gently picked it up. Within moments, it dropped unconscious.

I brought it onto the porch and laid it on a dishcloth just to keep it off the freezing-cold surface. It died a few minutes later.

It had no apparent injury, so my speculation is it died of starvation. This is the harsh reality of life in winter for many birds, and one of the reasons I like to keep our bird feeder full during the colder months.

Poor little flicker.

It is NOT SNOWING right now

You'll be pleased to know it is NOT SNOWING right now.

After all, that's what the weather report says. I believe it, don't you? This is RAIN.

Everything you see in this photos is just an illusion. I used PhotoShop.

Good thing, too. I'd hate for it to be, y'know, winter. So repeat after me: It is NOT SNOWING.....

Snow whomp + power outage

If I've been silent for the last couple of days, it's because we finally got our power back on. It went out late Tuesday night after we got a snow whomp. It looks like winter arrived at last.

I mean, seriously. While the rest of the country already had their snow whomps, we were mild and snow-free. Sure, we had some chilly temps, but otherwise bare ground.

All that changed this past week. At first it was just a soft and picturesque snowfall of a couple inches.

The cows didn't seem overly fazed.

Most of the snow melted off over the next couple of days. And then, overnight, WHOMP.

Unsurprisingly, we lost power during this blitz. Out here, the power grid goes down for seemingly any reason: a heavy snowfall, a wind, a Tuesday. We knew this was likely to happen and had everything prepped just in case.

The cows were a little more fazed by this snowfall. We decided to keep them in the corral for immediate access to shelter. Filet, our stand-offish formerly-range-cow Angus, is due to calve sometime in the next month (probably less), and we don't want to be chasing down a new baby in deep snow on the far side of the pasture.

I took a yardstick into the yard and measured how much snow fell overnight.

Twelve and a half inches of new snow, and we've gotten more since.

It almost came over the tops of my boots.

The effect was very pretty...

...especially after the clouds cleared and it turned into a strikingly sunny day.

The snowfall was an opportunity for every man in the neighborhood to climb onto whatever equipment he had available, and work to clear the road. I counted at least six different neighbors on six different pieces of equipment, not counting Don's efforts.

I kept the bird feeder filled, since I knew the feathered ones would have a hard time finding food under such conditions.

The quail had to literally break trails in the snow.

Since Older Daughter's side of the house isn't heated during power outages, she let Frumpkin (her cat) into the main part of the house (making sure Lihn the parrot was safely in her cage, of course). Frumpkin was fascinated by the activity at the bird feeder. Cat TV.

Toward dusk, we took Mr. Darcy for his afternoon walk and noted a large herd of elk, at least 25 animals, spread across a neighbor's field.

We lit the oil lamps and settled in for an evening of reading. Frumpkin was perched on Older Daughter's lap, looking quite pleased with himself.

The power stayed off for forty-eight hours, through clear sunny days and very dark nights.

Don used the back blade on the tractor to plow the lower driveway.

Frumpkin stayed in the main part of the house, looking very cute...

...while Darcy looked very worried. "That cat isn't supposed to BE here."

The power came back on early Friday morning and life got back to normal. And the elk? Well, they went strolling by right below the house. Gorgeous.