September 2011

Friday September 23rd, 2011

Greetings and welcome!

Two big updates for the weekend-

Item one.. Fall colors.. The fall colors really took off this week. Tuesday night I was driving home thinking how green and bland it was for late September, Wednesday night on the same road had a lot more color.

Now the early ones are really going off. Chris said that it was a nice ride out from Crivitz with all of the colors. I can tell in the back yard too, as the maples are really coming in today and yesterday.

It is surprising how fast that the Fall color came in. Earlier this week it wasn’t worth taking a ride, today it definately is.

Item Two- The weather-

We have had a drab cool week with occasional light rain. This is the result of what is known as a cut off low pressure system. The low pressure area is stuck between jet streams and just kind of grinding away in one spot. It is cut off from any significant moisture like a Gulf of Mexico moisture tap, thus the name, and the light and occasional nature of the rain.

The reason that I am sharing all of this is because our cut off low was supposed to move east by now and leave us a nice weekend, but the models and forecasts have it sticking around until about Tuesday now. That will introduce a chance of the occasional rain shower daily.

The NWS has a 20% chance of rain for Saturday, and a 40% chance Saturday night through Monday night. Tuesday it drops to 30% as the low is finally expected to move east. The TV was less optimistic about Saturday, but had Suunday nicer.

Personally I am not going to let it wash out my weekend, but I will be ready for rain. The brighter side of it is that damp overcast days really make the fall colors stand out, and where the early maples are coming in it should really be vivid.

That is about it from here. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Wednesday Sept 21, 2011-Updated

Well that didn’t take long.. There are two updates right off the bat..

First of all, the fall colors visibly changed between yesterday and today. A drive down the same road went from mostly green to some color emerging and starting to look nice. Some of it was the overcast vs sunny day, I suspect that the rain helped too.

Item #2 is an event that I forgot. This Saturday is a big 10th Anniversary party at Curve Inn. They are having two bands, one in the afternoon that plays general variety for everyone, and one later that rocks the house. There will be food and all kinds of stuff going on.

Read on for this morning’s update

-RJB

Greetings and welcome!

Since my last visit on Thursday a few things have happened. Number one, the cold mornings that were expected did indeed come. We had two mornings last week where the back field was well frosted, and it happened again a few days ago. So far the lowest that I have seen was in the mid-20s, and that was briefly at about sunrise. That cold air mass has passed and there is nothing in the forecast for the next week under 40.

I recall checking the upper air temperatures as that cold air mass was moving in, and checking for the possibility of snow. We did not see any, but I had an unofficial report of a few flakes by Eagle River and Land O Lakes.

Fall starts on Friday with the fall equinox at 11:49am CST. Apparently no one told the Great Outdoors about it, the fall colors are still in the early stages. There are some early trees and underbrush offering splashes of color, but the world around me is still mostly green.

My theory is that since we have had very little rain in the past weeks they are moving a little slow. When I was looking the other day some of my cherry and maple trees looked more wilting than color changing. My guess is that a little rain will set things off, but since I have a terrible track record predicting fall colors I should probably stick to observing.

We are expecting a minor chance of a rain showers daily until Friday, when the rain is expected to stop and we should have a nice weekend. The NWS is looking for 60 and partly cloudy Saturday, and mid-60s Sunday. Low temperatures over the weekend should be around 40.

Here is this weekend’s event list..

I got out to do some firewood last week, and out into the yard to process some of it Monday. My guess is that I am up to about 20% of what I need, so there is still wood to cut and split. It doesn’t look like much of a pile, but it goes about 10′ back.

Usually when I go cut in the woods I take the wood in as long of lengths and I can handle them, ideally 4′. The big stuff still gets cut into 16″ lengths there, some 16″ pieces are 100# or more. The smaller stuff I pile up and cut all at once in my stanchions.  Anything under about a 10″ diameter goes here.

The idea is that I can cut a lot in a few cuts and save a lot of time and effort. In this load I think that I had 26 pieces in, and 4 cuts (2 end, 2 center) made them into 56 perfect length pieces 16″. It would have been 78 plus ends, but some were short lengths.  Once cut, the big stuff gets thrown in the splitter pile, the small and medium stuff goes into the cart and gets stacked in the wood house.

It is a good system, and I make a lot less cuts in the woods where an errant dip in the dirt could dull a chain.

There was an article in the paper last week about a controversy at the recent county forestry committee meeting. Apparently a local snowmobile ATV club and the forestry department closed about 13 miles of logging trails to anything but snowmobiles and ATVs this Spring, and some people weren’t happy about it.

I don’t think that the article in the paper is enough info to have an informed opinion, so I am looking forward to talking to some of the club members. Right now I think that they might be stepping in something by a) Suggesting that there is a safety issue using those logging trails as  ATV/snowmobile trails, and b) Making it a lot harder to get future trail approval as logging road/trail users oppose new trails for fear of losing the roads and access to the forest.

I have been on both sides of the issue, seeing huge ruts in a freshly groomed snowmobile trail from trucks, and coming up on a group of ATVs while I was out on logging roads getting firewood.

For now I am limiting judgment and f0rming an opinion until I get more of the story. I have seen how some of the topics I have been involved with have been handled by the local paper.

That is about it for me today. I don’t expect that a lot will change by tomorrow, so I am planning on skipping out on my late week report. That seldom works, something usually comes up. When It does, I’ll be back.

That is about it for today. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday September 15th, 2011

Freeze Warning for tonight

Greetings and welcome!

Several of you sent in links from the wildfire in Minnesota, so let’s start with that.

The big fire up in the Boundary Waters grew a lot this week. When I did my writeup on Monday night it was still being reported at 11,000 acres. It quickly blew up in the winds of early week, and measured at 60,000, and now 100,000 acres.

Smoke from the fire could be smelled here Tuesday. Several people that I know went out looking to see if the house/woods/neighbor’s house was on fire. I am sure it happened a lot.  Nope, it was smoke from 250 miles away. Milwaukee had pictures in the paper of a haze over the city, and eventually Northern IL got the smoke and smell.

Here are a couple of links. This one is from the NASA Earth Observatory showing a dramatic satellite picture of the smoke plume (second pic).  This one is from a blog called Wildfire Today that maps it out and has recent news.

I am just glad that it isn’t here. Thankfully our forests are more carefully tended and don’t have the dead wood fuel load and remote terrain that the BWCA wilderness area will.

There was a fire here last night in my wood burner because it got down to 34 degrees. Again the gentle touch prevailed and I still haven’t blown myself out of the house with it bringing it up to 110 in here yet. There is still time, it is expected to be cold again tonight, with widespread frost and a low in the 25-30 range.

Between when I started writing and proofing it the NWS has issued a freeze warning for northern Marinette Co. Some areas could go into the low 20s.

The cold will moderate a little before the weekend. Today we are looking for a hi/low of 55/25. For Friday it goes to 62/39, Saturday 65/45, and Sunday 68/55. Our normal hi/lo for today is 66/44.

The NWS has moved the chance for rain from Monday up to Sunday afternoon. The way that it looks at the moment Sunday  will start out nice and have a better chance of rain showers as the day progresses. The rain chance according to them is 40%.

Yesterday I was driving along and hit a patch of critter sightings. In about 3 miles I saw a decent sized black bear, a turkey, and a pair of fawns, one of which bet her life on my reaction time and won.

The fall colors are still minimal but they continue to move in that direction. A lot of the trees are getting a more light green color on the way to the color phase. They aren’t red, yellow, or orange, but they are not the deep green of summer anymore.

There is on tree by the bridge over the Peshtigo River between the flowages on Parkway that is in full yellow. My guess driving by at 45 was that it was a yellow birch, but I wouldn’t bet heavy on the ID. The ferns are pretty well dead, an a lot of the underbrush is starting to show splashes of color. There are a few maple branches here and there coming into color.  It isn’t here yet, but it is on the way.

I missed doing events in my early week update, here they are

There is a pot luck and cookout with the Iron Snowshoe Associate Members next weekend on the 24th, but you need to let them know if you are coming by tomorrow so that they can plan ahead. See the Iron Snowshoe web site for details.

Speaking of snowmobiling, there is a vintage snowmobile grass drags and swap meet up at the Eagle River Derby Track this weekend. Friday night they are drag racing under the big lights, and Saturday they race and swap.

Our friend Leon Koch and his daughter Amanda from Koch’s Performance usually bring home a lot of trophies from this one with their choice vintage Yamahas. I have been to this one a few times and it is a fun first event of the season. As the interest in vintage sleds has grown, so has this event.

I haven’t moved from this site over to the snowmobiling site, but it is coming. There are already fall snowmobiling events to report on.

A sneak preview.. We could be in for another La Nina winter this year. Last year was a La Nina year, and the strongest recorded so far.

La Nina is the cold phase of the ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation. El Nino is the warm phase. It is hard to believe that equatorial water temperatures affect our climate so dramatically, but there is very strong correlation.

Right now the models are showing a mild La Nina with the mean of the 25 different models, and only one shows a strong El Nino. Nothing is carved in stone for a few months yet, and usually we don’t see two La Nina years in a row, but right now we are in cold phase conditions, and most indications are that we will be through the winter.

Here is a link (PDF) to the weekly discussion. The model graph is pretty far down, on page 27.

That is a wrap for this edition. I am off to cut wood or work on the truck/house/shop or something else in preparation for winter.

Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Tuesday Sept 13th, 2011

The morning news said that we may smell some smoke and have a hazy day today due to a big wildfire near Ely, MN. Apparently the winds are right that the smoke is coming our way and is heavy enough to reduce visibility in Rhinelander. I don’t see or smell anything as of 6:15am.

Update: A second check 10 minutes later definitely had a smoke smell.

Read on for the early week update, I did it last night.

RJB