Greetings and welcome!
Thank you to all of the people that came to visit at Rapids Resort Saturday. It was great to see so many friends.
We had a crazy busy weekend on the trails. There were groups of riders everywhere. It was also good to see so many people brought youngsters along with them.
From what I heard over the bar some of the trails took the warm day and traffic well, some didn’t. Reports had the trail between here and Goodman pretty rough. Not sure what happened there. It could just be that the warm sunny day making the snow pack into whoopties well combined with the busiest weekend that I have seen in a long time. I did see the groomer go by the resort about 8pm Saturday night. Hopefully they fixed it.
I do not have pictures this morning. By the time I figured out that I left the camera at the bar Sunday night it was too late. I will pick it up on the way to work and will have them for tomorrow.
I am doing a delayed start at work this morning due to -14 overnight lows and estimated -25 wind chills. Some days it is good to be your own boss.
We have some sunny days coming up this week, but no warm ones until next weekend. The TV says that the normal high in Green Bay today is 34. The forecast is for a high of 7, a near record cold high temperature. We are looking at a high of 10 here, and adding 5 degrees a day to our high temperature. Friday the forecast is for 30 and sunny.
The weekend forecast is a big question mark right now. There is a storm coming that looks like it will start with rain and 30+ temperatures before changing to snow Saturday night and Sunday. Right now it is just too far away to know how that one will end.
If it does rain that would be very bad for people with a big snow load on their roof. The added weight might be just the ticket to bad things. We have had sheds and mobile home roof collapsing already, and the neighbor’s car port is on the ground. I will be putting my new heavy duty snow rake to work this week clearing the house, sheds, and campers.
I saw on the TV that Wausaukee had 45″ of snow in February alone. Rhinelander had 54, and made it to 60″ if you include Saturday’s (March 2) snow. We probably had more than Wausaukee and a little less than Rhinelander, so lets just call it about four feet. That is why we need to shovel our roofs and the snowplow guys are running out of room.
Between that and all of our other snows in December and January it has been an amazing snow year. What is really amazing is that this is an ElNino winter. Usually they are rough on snowfall, this year we are getting tons of the stuff. If I got to write the script next time the 4′ of snow would come in December so that we could open trails and have them in great shape for the rest of the season. January thaw>? Who cares.. we have 4′ of snow.
Speaking of thaws, I don’t see one coming in the 16 day GFS forecast model. We will get into the 30s this weekend ahead of the storm, but that is about as warm a it is showing us getting in the next couple of weeks. The March sun is getting evil, but that looks like the biggest threat to our season for the first half of the month.
I keep waiting for the pendulum to swing back the other way. My rule of variability is that a 20 degree swing on either side of the normal high is normal, and a 30 degree variance is only a little unusual. Today Green Bay will see highs 24 degrees below normal. If it was the other was around and they were 24 degrees above their normal high of 34, we would be looking at a sunny 58 degree day. That is not anywhere in the forecast, but March is a fickle month, so don’t be shocked when it turns the other way.
As the month progresses the chances of a hard slam the other way increases. As much as warm weather would be welcomed by a lot of people I am not looking forward to that. It is going to be an ugly mud and melt season, and a fast melt could end badly in a lot of ways. The whitewater will be incredible, but I am not looking forward to the flooding in the driveway, work shed and so on.
Well we are almost up to 2 degrees so I am of to work. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB