March 2012

Friday March 30th, 2012

Greetings and welcome!

The great outdoors is white this morning. We had a decent sized storm come through last night and give us between an inch and two inches of snow on the ground. As of lunchtime, a lot of it is still there, but it won’t last long.

I had a pretty good idea that it would snow last night. When I was coming home from work the sky was mostly clear, but the moon had a hazy halo around it. That usually means that there are ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, and I expected that we would see snow by morning.

The weekend weather looks a little more inviting. Saturday we are looking for low to mid-50s and a cloudy day. The NWS put a minor chance of sprinkles in the forecast for afternoon as a warm air mass reaches the area in advance of an early week storm. There is nothing showing up for precip in the models, so don’t worry about it too much.  Sunday looks nice with temps in the mid-60s.

This past week was a little bit of a rude awakening when the temperatures dropped from thirty degrees above normal back to about where they should be. The 70s and 80s were easy to get used to, but were way out of the normal variability for this time of year.

Weekend events..

This is the weekend of the giant 10 Bar indoor mini-golf tournament. The bars around Twin Bridge and the High Falls Flowage each have a mini golf hole set up and you go place to place to golf the course. The tournament starts today and goes through tomorrow. Saturday night the score cards need to be back at Caldron Falls Bar by 7, where they will give out awards, prizes, and door prizes.

The other big thing going on this weekend is the second weekend of preseason  rafting with Kosir’s. We will be hitting the river again Saturday and Sunday. It looks like the river is running at about +5.

Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Tuesday March 27th, 2012

Greetings and welcome!

It is pretty clear by now that our Summer in March is over. We had a nice weekend for weather with above normal temperatures, and that was great while it lasted.

Sunday night got colder than it has been in weeks. It was a clear sky and a cold air mass, and our temperature got down to 19 early Monday morning. The NWS put out freeze warnings to give everyone a heads up, but I am not sure that nature got the warning. I haven’t heard a frog in the pond since, and they were really loud over the weekend.

Some of that might not be all bad. The hope is that some of our peskier species were emerging with the early breeding stock, the mother ships if you will, and got killed off. The top two in that category would be the mosquito and the wood tick. So far I have only had the thee mosquitoes, but over the weekend I saw a swarm hovering by tree branches as they like to do.

Sunday I was taking the laundry off of the clothes line and about 2 minutes after I was out there I had four wood ticks crawling up my shins. I got those and a few  more on my pants leg in the time that it took to take down one basket of clothes. My old cat found them too, and has one embedded in her neck. She doesn’t know it, but she is in for her first Frontline treatment of the season today. There was also a friend over the weekend that got a deer tick and the bull’s eye.

It would be a shame if the 19 degree night killed off a nice sized chunk of the mosquito and tick breeding populations, but that is probably wishful thinking.

Other bugs that I have encountered recently include a few moths, some little bugs that looked like mini-thunderbugs that were numerous by the river, a few spiders, and the paper wasp that I freed from between the window panes this morning.

Some tree species are getting pretty well along with their first leaves, and a lot of the grass is turning green. I saw some bulb based flowers emerging over the weekend. The surprise is that they were on the north side of a building where the sun doesn’t reach. Normally there would be a pile of ice and snow there for another month, along with frost in the ground.

People have reported seeing bears emerging from their dens, but I have not seen one yet. I kind of expected to see a lot of our hibernating wildlife like squirrels and chipmunks, skunks, badgers, and porcupines. If they are out, they are not common enough for me to encounter yet.

We started the whitewater rafting season over the weekend at Kosir’s. The weather was nice, the river was in the +12 range, and the water was a lot warmer than usual. We had groups run Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and there were a lot of good times to be had. They will be running trips again next weekend and are open for the season.

We had a group from Kayak Chicago join us on the river over the weekend. Not only were they very good boaters, they were really nice people and fun to be around. We are looking forward to their next visit. You will see a couple of them in the pictures..

Speaking of the water being warmer than normal, I heard from several people that the walleye run in the Peshtigo has already come and gone. I don’t know much about it, but that is what the guys that watch stuff like that were telling me.

The heating season is back. While I got away without having a fire in the wood stove many times over our warm two week stretch, it is back to normal now.  It takes at least one daytime fire and two reloads overnight now. I think that last week I went three days between fires at one point.

The warm weather couldn’t last forever. Our normal high and low temperatures for today are 44 and 22 respectively. This week our high temps are predicted to range from the mid-40s to the low 60s. The lows after tonight are in the twenties and thirties. There is a chance of rain today through tomorrow, and again Friday. The weekend looks nice for weather, but on the cool side with temps in the 50s and low 60s.

Here are the weekend events

The mini-golf tournament has been a fun event. You mini-golf a different hole at each trail stop, and you can start at any of them. The tournament is Friday night and Saturday, and the awards & prizes are given out at Caldron Falls Bar Saturday night. There will be food, golf tournament prizes, and door prizes.

Also Saturday night the Town of Stephenson Fire Dept. Auxiliary Chicken Dinner sounds inviting. As I recall it was food, beer, and a band for under $10, and a good time for a good cause.

That looks like a wrap for me today. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday March 22nd, 2012

Greetings and welcome!

It is a cloudy and damp day today. We had a line of rain pass through the area last night that wasn’t really heavy, but it definitely rained. We are expecting more rain later today and tonight, and again Friday. The good news is that the rain is supposed to stop in time for a decent weekend.

There is a big low pressure area swirling around over TX and OK today. It is what the weather guys refer to as a ‘cut off low’, meaning that it is outside of the normal east to west flow and is sitting there almost stationary. As this storm spins around, it is throwing off pinwheel arms of rain. Our next ones should come late today and tomorrow.

Cut off lows are hard to forecast. It could move out soon, it could camp there for a few days. Right now all of my model guidance has it moving off to the northeast over the next 24 hours. The HPC has our forecast for rainfall (QPF) at .01-.025″ between now and 6am Friday, and for .05-.075″ Friday to6am Saturday. Here is the 3 day QPF map for now through 6am Sunday. The Saturday 6am  to Sunday 6am field shows no rainfall for our area, so this is all expected between now and 6am Saturday.

The rain is welcome on a lot of levels, the first of which is wildfire danger. After the snow goes away and before the world turns green we have a lot of dead vegetation from last year’s growth. The Spring sun drys it quickly and fire danger rises to high or extreme. Spring is also windy, so the fires can spread very quickly.

Yesterday was a windy day with strong gusts. I stopped by a place on a computer call and they were listening to the scanner as DNR fire crews and area fire departments battled three different local blazes at the same time. One was by Perch Lake Rd, one was by Boat Landing #7, and I am stumped to name the third one at the moment.

Spring winds can come up fast and surprise you. I have had it happen a few times where I would go out to burn on a day with a light and variable breeze, and about the time that the fire really got going, the wind suddenly came up and was whipping at 15-20mph, turning my fire into a forge and shooting sparks everywhere.

Anyway, be careful with your fire until the area vegetation greens up again. This doesn’t just apply to camp fires, burning barrels, and burning leaves and brush. It also means don’t chuck lit cigs out of the car window. I have seen a few burned patches along roads from that already this week.

The rain is always welcome for the people that like our whitewater rivers. Kosir’s is opening rafting a couple of weeks early this weekend and the way that I understand it there are Saturday and Sunday trips planned.

The Peshtigo has been running big over the past week, peaking out at about +19 the first part of the week. It looks like it is at about +16 at the moment, and slowly inching down. The rain will help stop that fall and hopefully add to the fun. Call Kosir’s to make your weekend arrangements. It is a rare chance to do some pre-season rafting with spring water levels and temps in the upper 50s or low 60s.

Chris has been asking about the frogs in the pond out back. The croakers have been common for about a week, the Spring Peepers that do the high pitched vreep vreep just started about two days ago. Those are still hit and miss.

I finally got to read a little of last week’s paper. They had an extensive article in there about a recent ATV meeting. Item one was that the side by side ATVs (or LUVs) have been successful it the counties (like ours) that did pilot programs allowing them on ATV trails. Now they are taking them state-wide this year.

An idea that met with very little support was putting a 25mph speed limit on trails to increase safety. That idea failed for a lot of reasons.  They discussed signing certain hazardous spots with speed limits, and that went ok as long as it didn’t get too complicated. There was  discussion on making a play or intensive use area, a second ATV campground, and roads being open to ATVs. It sounded like a very positive meeting according to the article.

As long as we are on the topic of ATVs, I want to remind you of the Hidden Bear Trail ATV Club’s fundraiser Saturday at Lakewood Town Hall. They are raising money for signs for marking all of the Town of Lakewood roads for ATV use by this May. It is a huge undertaking, and signs are expensive, especially on that scale.

Don’t mistake the town of Lakewood for being right around Hwys 32 & F. Chickadee, Buck’s Ranch, and parts of Boat Landing 11 Road are all in the town of Lakewood. My house is near the Hwy C & F junction in Silver Cliff, and the Town of Lakewood starts about a mile south of my land. Opening those roads means a lot to Silver Cliff and Town of Stephenson based riders too.

There is also a benefit for the Lakewood Zoo this Saturday at the Mountain Community Center in Mountain. They became a non-profit over the winter and will need a lot of support from the community. The fun starts at 9am. There will be an auction, a silent auction, horse drawn wagon rides, kid’s games, and more.

That is news from here for today. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Wednesday March 21, 2012

Greetings and welcome!
The weather the past few weeks has been amazing, incredible, unbelievable, and well beyond normal. Our normal high temps were in the upper 30s and we were hitting upper 70s and low 80s on many of the days. It is unprecedented.

Normally we are within 20-25 degrees of our normal high temp, either on the high or low side. It is our normal range of variability. To have temps more than 30 degrees outside of our normals is pretty rare. To have variability of 40 degrees is not something that I am aware of happening in my memory. We have been into the low 80s, pushing beyond the 40 degrees above normal mark.

A lot of years we can still snowmobile in mid and late March. This year is a little different. Most of the frost is out of the ground, and only sheltered spots that don’t get much sun hold a little patch of snow or soft spots. Most roads and driveways that get some sun are done with frost out, and are firm. There are still some spots on forest roads and sheltered driveways that are soft, again where they are sheltered from the sun.

Last weekend was the weekend to get ice shanties off of the lakes. This is the week that they draw down the flowages to break up the ice and make room for the rush of melt water. It is really something seeing the 2-3 foot thick slabs of ice along the shoreline.

Again this year is a little different. The lake on Parkway a couple of miles south of X was completely ice free today when we drove by at about noon. The boat landing by X was still socked in, but not all of it, and not for long.

When I got home I had to go and see if Caldron Falls Flowage was breaking up, and as of 2pm Tuesday it wasn’t just breaking up, it was ice free and wide open. There was one little patch of ice in the shadows of Landing 11, but the launch was well clear, and the lake had NO ice as far as the eye could see, up or downstream. I recall years where fishermen were bumping ice in the beginning of May, this year we are wide open and ice free before April.

This isn’t lost on whitewater rafting. Again the river has broken up and is mostly ice-free. It is running big as the melt water hits the rapids stretch, and it has been in the 15-19″ range all week. There are a lot of years that we can’t open on time the first weekend in April because the river is frozen over still. Some years we miss the first two weekends. This year in a move unprecedented in their 37 years, Kosir’s is opening three weeks early. We start rafting Saturday at noon.

Mother Nature is responding. The maple trees have their red flowers out. The popple trees are getting their first hazy leaves. I saw the first new green grass in the front yard yesterday. I have had three mosquitoes (gators), two that tried to land on me and feed already. All three died. The neighbor wrote the other day that she saw her first wood tick. I also spotted my first skunk of the year, dead along 32 in Lakewood last weekend.

So we are off to an unusual start when the lakes are open and the frost is out of the ground on the first day of Spring. What is going on? Visualize a circle of really cold air swirling around the north pole. In a normal winter the circle expands and lets the cold air come south, giving us the rigors of Winter.This year that circle expanded, but it did so on the other side of the planet, giving Europe record cold and snow that almost reached the African continent. Hundreds of people died of exposure in Europe.

In the meantime, the cold air stayed north on our side of the planet, allowing the northern jet stream, normally going across Canada to move north. Alaska got slammed repeatedly, our winter was more along the lines of a Southern IL or IA winter than being north of the 45th.

At the same time our La Nina (the cold phase of El Nino) was taking the storms across the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies, leaving any that did come our way weak and played out of moisture.

When the southern jet brought storms, they just blew through the east coast for the lack of a blocking pattern over the Atlantic to push them north instead of east.

The lack of a blocking pattern ended a few weeks ago, and recently we have been seeing a continent sized area of high pressure camped off of the east coast. The clockwise rotation and flow from that high pressure has been pumping warm southern air into our region, giving us the normal plus thirty or forty degrees that we have been seeing.

Nothing last forever in weather, and our 70s and 80s will soon be replaced by 50s and 60s (Thursday), still 10-20 degrees above normal. We are also looking at the possibility of some rain today through the end of this week. The HPC says that we could see as much as 1-1.25″ between by Saturday morning. The weekend should clear out as the rain moves off Saturday morning, leaving us in the mid-50s and low 60s.

A lot of people have been asking about the ATV trails opening early. Normally they close with the snowmobile season and open the first Friday in May once the frost is out of the ground. My time outdoors the past few days found the ground mostly firm, but there were still sheltered muddy spots where I would sink in up to my ankles or worse. It is a big county, and there are still sheltered spots up north that will be soft for a while yet. If all goes well the county could decide to open trails a weekend or two early. That is just my guess.

We have some events coming up this weekend and next weekend.

I saw in the paper that they are having a fundraiser for the Lakewood Zoo Saturday at the Mountin Community Center. There will have an auction and silent auction, horse drawn wagon rides & kid’s games, a chili cook-off,  and more.

Also Saturday the Hidden Bear ATV Club is having a fun day at the Lakewood Town Hall from 1-6. They are having meat and 50-50 raffles, and food and drink. This is a fundraiser for signs for the ATV club to mark all of the Town of Lakewood roads for ATV routes for travel by May. That is a pretty epic undertaking, hopefully they find a lot of support.

Next weekend there is a big indoor mini-golf tournament at the bars and restaurants around the High Falls Flowage and the surrounding area. Each establishment makes their own creative putt putt golf hole, and you go from place to place. Talking to the organizer last weekend, there are tons of door prizes. The tournament is Friday & Saturday, and you can start at any of the places. Here is a link to an info page.

Participating Locations

From the feedback that I have gotten, people had a lot of fun with it.

Well let’s wrap things up today with some pictures from Caldron Falls Flowage by Boat Landing 11 from Tuesday afternoon. (Click the picture to make it bigger, then click the left or right side to go forward or backward in the slideshow.)

Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB