Greetings and welcome!
It sounds like more than a few of you found good trails not too far north of here. See the comments from the last report. ( Thanks you guys!!) Riders that stopped by our neighborhood, mostly with sleds on trailers or by wheel, came back with similar reports.
From my various travels Friday and Saturday I saw a lot of ice. Roads, driveways, and trails all were thick with ice. The rain a week ago soaked into the base and made it a rock. The freeze thaw rounded it off and made it very slippery. It will be a heck of a base if it ever snows on top of it to give it some traction and fill in the ugly spots. As it stands, some roads, driveways and trails are pretty slick with ice. Reports had the flowage glare ice.
The big news over the weekend is that the bar at Thornton’s Resort burned down Friday night. The fire started after they closed, and at 3:30 the fire departments were called and it was already fully engulfed.
That is a big disaster for anyone, but they were running the radar runs and fish-o-ree on Caldron Falls that started early in the morning. That had to be a rough ride. They did carry on and have the event and people said that there was a good turnout.
You might have noticed the full mooon over the weekend. It was the Wolf moon, so named for the hungry wolves of January howling, and probably the source of the classic iconic wolf howling in front of the giant moon pictures.
The moon travels in an elliptical orbit. January’s full moon was a perigee moon, meaning that it was at the closest point in it’s orbit path. It was 14% wider and 30% brighter than the rest of the full moons of 2010. February’s full moon comes on the 28th, and is called the snow moon, due to Feb often bringing the most white stuff. Let’s hope so.
Tomorrow is Ground Hog Day, and it feels like I am in the movie. I keep checking the 16 day GFS for a sign of a storm, and it keeps coming up with none.
What is going on? Well, we are under a force field of high pressure coming out of Canada. That keeps pushing the storms south. We can’t even seem to get a proper clipper system.
It is not the dreaded El Nino, but it’s distant cousin the Arctic Oscillation. The AO is negative, indicating low pressure in the Arctic, and high pressure in the mid-latitudes. That high pressure is shielding us from storms.
I took a look and the models show the AO staying negative for a few weeks and bouncing back. (More info)
In the shorter term, our week looks comfortable but not too snowy.We should start out in the low 20s today and get into the upper 20s for late week and the weekend.
It looks like our light snow for Tuesday washed out, with the bulk of that snow going downstate. It isn’t much of a storm, more of a minor disturbance.
The next chance of snow comes Friday and all weekend. Again it isn’t much of a storm, bit it will keep light snow in the forecast for Friday-Sunday. There are several other minor disturbances that could bring light snow over the balance of the 16 day forecast.
While we don’t have as much snow as we would like, let’s take a little field trip to Mount Hood, Oregon. Some place called Mount Hood Meadows has over 40″ since Tuesday and get this- 640″ for the season (53feet 4inches). I wonder if they would sell a couple of feet cheap. Link Hat tip to ‘Steve Oregon’, commenter at the Watts Up With That Blog.
Several people asked about the fate of the bunny hunt on the Iron Snowshoe trails since much of the system is closed. I have not heard that they suspended it. Presumably you can get to the various trail stops by car to get the clues.
As far as taking the plow off of the truck and stealing parts off of the snowmobile, the snowmobile goes down later today. I will be swiping the pipe and battery to see about hearing RXL #2 run. The plow will come as time permits.
Finally this morning, a really cool video that Slug sent me. It is an awesome snow machine circa 1925 or so. You should go watch it, it is really neat. I want one. If you look down in the comments, there is a link to another more advanced one that is quite impressive too. The pop up following the video showed this wild off roader too. It is a little off topic, but pretty cool.
Thank you to all that stopped by the Rapids this weekend.
Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB
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