Greetings and welcome!
I wasn’t planning on skipping a report but I got a little overwhelmed with work and must-do stuff. In the meantime I put a lot of miles on the car and saw a lot of areas.
Monday evening’s trip to Crooked lake found excellent conditions between here and there. The trails were all groomed beautifully flat and the forest roads had a good ice base with some free snow.
On one forest road Lakewood decided to just stop plowing halfway down it. I came around a corner and found myself in 8-10″ of snow and not much for tracks. There was no place to turn around, and the only option was the go pedal. My fancy snow tires paid for themselves but it was quite a ride to the next township. I would have been thrilled on the sled, but in my little two wheel drive car after sunset at -5 it was a rush.
On the way back the trail along Hwy W was freshly groomed and untouched by sleds. It looked fantastic. Caldron Falls Road again had a nice ice layer and some snow, and the trails along the road looked great. The same goes for Boat Landing 11 Rd.
Today my travels found me in Lakewood, Townsend, Carter, down the east side of High Falls Flowage, Crivitz, Athelstane, and Wausaukee. Again the trails that I could see from the road were all nicely groomed and very inviting.
The exception was Crivitz up to Wausaukee where things were getting thin. They had less snow than we had west of Hwy 141.
We are clearly in prime season for trail conditions. Get it while you can.
Now that we are in February the sun is becoming a factor, and things in that direction will start moving really fast. I could feel the warm sun beating on me as I was driving even late in the afternoon. There were sunny spots on the otherwise snowy and icy (treated) roads where the sun had melted it bare even with today’s high of 12 degrees.
We are rapidly adding to the length of day, and have picked up almost an hour of daylight since the December solstice. Today our length of day is 9 hours 58 minutes. On Feb 28th it is up to 11 hours and 4 minutes.
At any rate we are in for good trail conditions for this weekend. I don’t see a temperature over 25 degrees until next Tuesday. We are expecting to go into the mid-30s after that, but there are no huge meltdowns obvious. The weekend should be comfortable with a high of about 20 both days.
As far as snow, we are not expecting any significant snow until next week, with small storms possible early and later in the week. In the far reaches of the 16 day GFS there is less of the arctic air and a couple of big storms are possible, but that also brings more volatile temperature swings.
Like I said, we are in prime season right now for conditions. It should be a great weekend on the trails.
Have a good Wednesday and thank you for visiting!
RJB