April 2013

Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

Greetings and welcome!

Last weekend was a very fun one around Kosir’s and on the Peshtigo River. Quite a few people took to the river to brave the icy waters and challenge the big waves and rapids. The river was running about +10 to +12 and it ate more than a few paddlers.

By the 3pm trip the sun was doing its thing. The snow in the woods was getting soft, and the snow on the trail that I walked on top of at 10am was now soft for the first 4-5″ of its knee deep depth. On the way to the river I saw where streams of water were making thier way down the road from the snow banks on the sides.

The river came up a couple of inches over the course of the day. Ask any experienced paddler, and they will tell you that a rising river is a lot pushier than a falling one. Saturday afternoon it was rising fast and issuing lessons. I had a lot of Code 209 pictures where there was a raft with two people in the rapid, but only a paddle or helmet was showing.

At the end of the noon trip some sharp eyed bystanders spotted these guys along the river.

This weekend and next week will be spectacular for whitewater rafting. The weather from Friday to Monday is expected to start in the 60s Friday and Saturday and get up to 70 by Monday. Considering that it is still like winter in the watershed, the warm sunny days will put a lot of melt water into the river really fast and make it just roar. This is the weekend between the weather and the water. May 4th & 11th look very good too, but I can’t promise 60+ weather to go with the big water.

It does not look like April 23rd around here. The driveway is still deep with mud from the frost and the rain. The lakes are still frozen over and not really making any moves toward thawing out. When I was near Wabeno yesterday I’d guess that they had 85-90% snow cover left in the woods. Only sunny spots were bare. Here is the kicker.. We haven’t had a 60 degree day yet. Our normal high is 60, but we haven’t made it out of the 40s and 50s yet this year.

That frozen lake thing is throwing a lot of people curve balls. A check of the Lake-Link web site had fishing reports with 20-30″ of ice on Oneida Co lakes not too far from here. One friend walked across Chute pond last Friday, pretty comfortable that the 24″ of ice would hold them. When I went by Waubee Lake yesterday it was not really melting, not even by the edges. That is kind of scary stuff considering that fishing opens in 11 days.

The warm weather this weekend will be a welcome change. Last Saturday I was wearing long Johns, polar fleece, and wearing the boots that I snowmobile in. It will be nice to trade that in for jeans and a light jacket. The boots will probably stay, mostly because of the mud and melt water that I expect.

This year will be remembered as the year that winter hung on until late April. We have it bad, but to our northwest it is worse. Last week there was lake effect snow in the western UP and Vilas Co, and some places got a foot of the stuff and near blizzard conditions. Yesterday’s storm had the potential to bring those same areas another 5-10″. It could be worse.

Well I am going to run along and fill up the day. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday April 18th, 2013

Greetings and welcome!

This was an interesting week for weather. Monday we got the rebound from the snow and cold over the weekend and it actually went above 50. It was a very windy day though, and there were a couple of the punky dead popples and birches that got taken down. Healthy trees did fine.

The warm and sunny day humbled the snow pack, and the driveway is almost clear and fairly firm now. That is a dramatic change from what it looked like Sunday. I haven’t been north of C where it was still winter last week, but it is probably still like that now.

We were expecting two plus inches of rain late this week and even had flood watches out. That did not work out according to plan, the storms went south and east of where they were expected. We did see over 1/2″ of rain Sunday night/Monday morning, and a little yesterday and today, but not anything  like where the storm hit. A little south of the state line they had 5.5″ of rain yesterday/last night. According to the USGS gauge by Kosir’s we are at about an inch for the week so far.

The Peshtigo River is on the rise. People going whitewater rafting this weekend will be in for a very good ride. The river is flowing at about 550CFS, I’d guess at about +8 or 9. It is on an upward trend, and the wet week will help. The big push of melt water has started, and it only goes up from here.

There are some events this weekend.

There is a meat raffle at Fisher’s Camp being put on by the old owners Glenn and Debbie as well as Sally and Mark. It is Saturday and it starts at 2pm.

There is also an indoor mini-golf tournament around Athelstane. Here is a poster bit from Facebook.

The Curve Inn is having their monthly birthday party for people born in April Saturday night, and this month’s theme is goofy hats. That could get interesting.

There are things that I am missing here or haven’t covered yet, but it has been a day of surprises, and I have to go and deal with the most recent one. Have a good Thursday and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Monday April 15th, 2013

Greetings and welcome!

It has been an interesting 6 days since I updated here last. Late last week our server company got hit with a hacker attack that lasted a few days. They kept the servers up and running, but I couldn’t log in to post. The Big Snow Page is on a different server and so I had to do my late week update there.

We were making good progress with spring last week until Thursday. The frost was coming out of the driveway and it was finally firming up. A lot of the side roads were getting thinner on the glacial ice layer from the winter.

Thursday brought some rain, followed by about 4-5″ of snow in a hard driving wind Thursday night. It was near whiteout conditions for a while. Thursday night got down into the 20s and firmed everything up a little. They didn’t plow some back roads, and by Friday night they were frozen up with 4″ plus deep tire tracks. Winter was back.

I really expected the snow and cold to lock the river back up, but it didn’t, and we started the Kosir’s whitewater rafting season Saturday at noon. We had a full trip of adventurous people hit the river, and they were rewarded with a rare view of some really scenic big ice formations on the river.

That is pretty hard core, right? Well, these guys were camping in snow, rafting in an ice maze on the river in 40+ degree temps, and walking through knee deep snow and ice to get there. Saturday night it got down to 14 degrees and solidly froze in the water, ice, and puddles from the snow, along with any footprints or tracks. Some were tent camping it in the snow.

There wasn’t any whining going on, they were partying like rock stars and making the best of the adventure. It most definitely was a very memorable opening weekend, and if you looked up hard core in the Funky Wagnal’s there would probably be a group picture or two from last weekend at Kosir’s there.

Heading up to the river to do my pictures I found that it is still full blown winter not too far north of here. The side road hadn’t been plowed, and there was 4-5″ of snow on top of the winter’s ice base. That made turning in corners kind of a suggestion, and the smallest error brought a stuck truck. The snow on the way down to the river was knee deep or better, and heavy with the ice layers and last week’s rain. I was thinking that it was a shame that they had shut down the snowmobile trails with conditions like that.

Sunday brought an overcast day and a pending storm. It snowed on radar for a few hours before it snowed here on the ground, but eventually we got an inch or so before it turned to rain about sunset. The rain was pretty cold, the roads were cold from the weekend, the sun was setting, and it was just under 32. At that point we likely had some icy roads for a while.

Later the rain came heavier, and a couple of waves could be heard pounding on the roof. Early morning brought a seriously dense fog, but it didn’t last long once the sun came up. Now we are headed for a sunny 50ish April day.

With the extended winter the Peshtigo River was just open enough to raft. The big melt hasn’t even started yet. As I mentioned above, it is still straight up winter in the watershed. It was hard to quantify the river levels last weekend because of ice on the river messing with the USGS gauge and focusing the water. Looking at the center rock at First Drop, I’d guess that it was somewhere between +6 and +9″.

As the river is breaking up it is building and blowing out ice dams. That is causing spikes and valleys on the gauge. As the big ice starts to move this week and next I would expect some really big ice dams and huge rushes of ice and water to roar down the river when they blow out. It is one of those cool and just overwhelmingly powerful forces of nature.

With the amount of ice and snow still locked up in the watershed I am really excited about the prospects for rafting this April and May. Today is the first day in quite a while that we will hit our normal high of 50, so not much has melted yet.

This week will be close to normal for the most part, so the thaw should start but not be too dramatic. There is a storm for about Thursday that could bring around an inch of rain, plus a little snow on the finish.That should perk up the river a little and bring good water levels for the weekend.

We should have good water levels for whitewater rafting next weekend and for the foreseeable future. Looking at the 16 day GFS forecast model I am seeing a pretty gradual thaw, with the first really warm (60+) temperatures coming around the end of the month.

Here are some pictures from around Kosir’s Saturday..

Thank you to all of the people that made last week very interesting!

Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB

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Tuesday April 9th, 2012

Greetings and welcome!

We have somewhat of an unpleasant week ahead for weather. We have a big storm to our south that will bring us rain, sleet and snow off and on from now until Friday afternoon. Later in the storm it is expected to become accumulating snow, but with the rain/snow line close and cold air to the north, it could come much sooner.

This is one of about four big storms that could hit us in the next two weeks. The one for late Sunday looks like snow, and not a little of it. Think 4-6 plus.

People like me with long muddy driveways probably aren’t too happy with the wet weather at the same time that the frost is coming out of the ground and making it swampy anyway. It is definitely mud season in Silver Cliff, at least in the areas where the sun has already eaten the snow away.

This year winter held on for a couple of extra weeks. It wasn’t just the big ice layers that kept the snow around, March was colder and snowier that usual. Marinette County actually extended the snowmobile season closing date from the usual March 31 up to yesterday, April 8th. It is unprecedented in my time here, but a friend said that it happened in 1995 too.

That late winter probably will not be good news for ATV riders wanting to get started on the trails. They close all trails from March 31 until the ground firms up, usually the first weekend in May. They have held it back as late as the second weekend in recent years if conditions required it. This year probably will not bring an early start.

While riding snowmobiles around Silver Cliff or the flowages was a non-starter last weekend, they were still riding good trails 20 miles north up by the Goodman and Hwy 8 areas last Saturday. Spring is just starting to find those areas.

Normally we would have started the whitewater rafting season with Kosir’s last weekend, but the late winter put the kibosh on that for us. There were still ice bridges across some of the rapids, and since it was still winter in the watershed, there wasn’t much for melt water coming down the river.

That will change this week with the warmth and rain from the weekend and the big storm this week. The slow water areas of the river right by the bridge at Kosir’s opened up a lot Sunday alone, and the rest is starting to clear out too. The process is just starting, but it is under way, and the river is rising.

In some years in the past decade the melt has come early, and the big spring flows did too. That isn’t the case this year. As I mentioned, they were still snowmobiling on good trails up in the watershed last weekend. All of that snow and ice is still in place, and will make the river roar when it does finally melt.

There are two elements to the river’s flow, the base flow from the spring creeks and swamps, and the fast run off from melt and rain. Both look pretty good right now.

A lot of the melt has been soaking into the ground here in Silver Cliff. That is good in that it will raise the groundwater level, and increase the base flow that is always there. That bodes well for the longer term, bringing expectations of a good spring season in to May and beyond.

As far as the run off, that firecracker is lit, just waiting to go off. There is still knee deep snow layered with ice piled up in the watershed, and there are no less than four big storms in the two week forecast.

As far as the rafting goes, I think that it would be hard to pick a bad weekend to go in the next month. The river is already into the fun zone and rising fast, and it is just starting to see the first melt water. I am expecting a good weekend this weekend and some big water after that. From my chair, a fantastic whitewater rafting season is pretty much a lock.

For now we are playing in the mud. It is pretty common to see cars parked at the end or driveways because the frost out make them too soft to be passable or passable without rutting it up.

I have been seeing a lot of spring critters out already. The chippys are out, squirrels are active, there were skunks and porkys out last week, and I  even saw some sand hill cranes yesterday.

Turkey hunting is getting started, and we are not short on those. I probably saw 30+ along the road on my trip to Lakewood yesterday. I told a friend last week that he’d have better luck turkey hunting if he spread out a big tarp in the woods and painted up up like a road since that is where they all seem to be hanging out. It was funny at the time.

Well as usual the clock is not my friend, so I am off to dive into another full day. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!

RJB