Thursday 12-16-2021

Greetings and welcome!

We had a rough night. It got very warm and rained some. The high at Athelstane Weather was 50, but I will swear that it was 10 degrees warmer than that when I got home late last night.

We had some extreme wind gusts and a lot of dead trees came down. The peak gust at Iron Mountain was about 40 according to the NWS. I am guessing that we had some 50-60mph or maybe even more. Right now the Public Service website shows 48,000  people out. Being a small outage I don’t expect to be a high priority. I am still on generator power at 1pm.

I traveled to Lakewood and Antigo this morning and all of the trees down that I saw were dead ones that were ready to go. I only saw one live pine snapped off.

As far as snow loss yesterday and last night were pretty devastating. Roads and driveways are bare as are south facing hillsides. Sheltered areas fared better but probably have a foot or less of snow. Some of the trails out by Langlade had been groomed but had a lot of dirt.

When I was coming back I saw that the Nicolet Trail had a nice little slush and ice base started. That will serve them well. Some of the other Lakewood trails were also groomed and they fared ok for the most part. Iron Snowshoe hasn’t done the area right in Silver Cliff yet. There is still snow to work with and probably some ice under it.

It would be good to have another storm to get trails nice again.

It chaps me a little that we had knee deep snow with a lot of promise and that I paid for 4 snowplowings and a week later I am looking at more dirt than I want to see. Mother nature is a cruel (censored).

I will follow up later if there is more news.

RJB