The scurs puzzlement continues as the Weather Eye continues to disappoint, stuck on the January snow globe setting. Do we get out of our weather rut or are we stuck with it? Starting Wednesday, partly sunny with a good chance of evening snow. Highs near 10 with lows in the single digits below zero. Thursday, partly sunny with a good chance of snow in the forenoon. Highs in the upper teens with lows near zero. Mostly cloudy on Friday with a good chance of snow. Highs in the mid-teens with lows near zero. Saturday, partly sunny and breezy. Highs in the mid-single digits with lows in the low teens below zero. Mostly sunny for Sunday and continued cold. Highs in the low single digits with lows near 10 below. Monday, mostly sunny with highs around 10 above and lows near 5 below. Mostly sunny for Tuesday with highs in the mid-teens and lows around 0. The normal high for March 1st is 33 and the normal low is 16. The scurs are finding it easy to keep their frozen Milky Way bars hidden outside in a cooler. Now if they could only remember which snowbank they put it in.
Indeed it has been a stretch of cold weather some have perhaps become unaccustomed to. The way December and January started out it made one wonder if we weren’t heading for an earlier rather than later spring. That all changed of course. This makes two years in a row now that we’ve had “real” winter. The SROC in Waseca had already broken the all-time record for February snowfall before the Sunday blizzard hit. Temperatures have remained well below normal as well, as you can see by temperature data above. Also looking at the SROC numbers as of the 25th we see the average temperature is 10.8 degrees below normal and the average low for the month was -2.9. That’s cold even by January standards.
This past weekend’s storm was reminiscent of those we grew up with in the 60s and 70s Heavy snowfall followed by plummeting temperatures and high winds. Sound familiar? As kids we were always hoping for a storm to show up on a Sunday night, and frequently it seemed like we got our wish. Of course we didn’t have some of the snow removal equipment we have today, so it wasn’t unusual for school to be called off for a couple days, so people could dig out and crews could get the roads passable again. This one made me appreciate what my folks must’ve gone through having livestock to care for during weather like this. Luckily for us anyway, no bratty kids home from school to contend with.
The blizzard warning at the ranch caused an uptick in our activity level as we readied to hunker down. We needed to get some lambs processed by docking tails, ear tagging, and immunizing before we could move them and their mothers. We got that done in the a.m. and bedded the pens later in the afternoon. Then before evening chores we moved four pens to the main barn. It’s always an adventure as one is never sure if the ewe will follow her lamb or freak out and run back into the barn as Cheviots are prone to do. When there are twin lambs, each of us take a lamb and ideally the ewe follows. Ruby the Border Collie gets into the act, tailing the ewe. It’s comforting to look back and see her instinctive walking crouch. Along with comic relief that’s what we have her for.
I’d made a trip to the store where you go to the bathroom in the orange silo earlier that day. I hadn’t been north on our road for a few weeks, so was amazed to see the amount of snow pushed back on either side. In places it was piled up as high as the cab on the pickup. If the forecast held true, blocking the road wouldn’t take much. Time to make sure our snow removal equipment was ready to rock at the ranch. Fluid levels checked, chains oiled and tanks fueled up. When the snow started about 5:30 that afternoon one could tell it meant business. Fortunately we’d put a new fabric door on the lambing barn minutes before it started to snow. Not a minute too soon.
When I checked for new lambs at 10 p.m. Saturday night I took my yardstick and measured the snow at several points between the house and barn. At that point 8” of snow had fallen and it was still snowing hard. The wind switched directions through the night and by morning the yard had completely blown shut. We climbed and rolled over drifts to get to the main barn. Once there we fired up the skidsteer to blaze a trail between buildings and back to the house, so we could haul feed and water. It took some doing, but after 20 minutes the yard was semi-navigable again. The animals were all glad to see us and were dry with the buildings being buttoned up before the storm.
Winds picked up Sunday, causing the visibility to deteriorate. Midafternoon saw a gust of 52 mph at the Waseca airport. It wasn’t unusual for the Dubya’s building site a quarter mile away to disappear from sight entirely. At times we couldn’t even see our barn roughly 60 yards from the house. The snowbanks were enormous and had me questioning whether I’d be able to handle them with the blower. The winds subsided as evening choretime neared. We had to reopen the trail from morning first as it filled back in entirely in spots. Wading through snowbanks with water buckets is a good time said no one ever.
By Monday morning, as we’d surmised by various media outlets, the impact of the storm had been enormous. People were stranded across much of southern MN. I-35 and I-90 were both closed as well as numerous state and US highways. County blacktop roads were also blocked as I’d discovered after chores Sunday night. Two major drifts covered the road in front of our place and there was no going through them with an automobile. There was no sense in trying to move snow on Monday until it looked like we could get somewhere. Reality check: One would’ve only made it as far as the next spot where the road was blocked. There you’d sit or turn around and go home. That’s why everyone runs to the grocery store the day before. Can’t make French toast without milk, bread and eggs!
See you next week…real good then.