2-5-19

Greetings and welcome!

I am delighted that the temperature Monday morning warmed up enough to keep our ice storm from taking down trees and power lines. It was just enough right in the nick of time. Just because the power didn’t go out doesn’t mean that this was not a troublesome ice storm.Untreated roads, driveways, parking lots are all glare ice.

We hit a high of 37 Monday which helped to de-ice the car and other outside stuff. It also made the ice on the roads and driveways have a layer of water on top of them. When I went outside this afternoon I could barely stand up in the driveway and walking up even a small incline was not going to happen without walking in the snow next to the driveway.

My 1/4 mile private road was all like that too. That presented a problem since there is a pretty big hill between me and the main road and there was no way that I would make it down that without crashing, let alone back up it. I have some salt, but nowhere near enough. My answer was to take the snowblower and take a couple of inches of snow off of each side of the driveway shooting it high into the air and back onto the driveway. That put a thin layer of kind of wet and soft  packing snow onto the wet ice with the force of falling 20′. Hopefully once the temperature crashed last night (low single digits) the  should bond to the wet topped ice and give me at least a little traction. I don’t know if my plan worked or not, I will find out in a little while.

The brief  warm weather and rain should not have hurt the trails. If anything it will consolidate the snow and add to the base. It definitely glazed road trails. I will know more once I go to work in a little while.

We have snow coming a couple of times this week. The first snow is coming later today into tonight. That one should bring about 4-5″ of snow according to the NWS, the TV says about 3″. The storm for Thursday looks a little stronger. As long as it stays on track with my current guidance that could be a 4-6 storm. That one could move north a little and put some mix into the mess, but right now it looks very good.

Have a good Tuesday and thank you for visiting!

RJB