Greetings and welcome!

Without much warning, only a couple of hours notice, our governor shut down all of the bars and restaurants in WI at 5pm on St Patrick’s Day. No one ever thought it could happen.

Right now everyone in the area is closed down for inside seating. Rapids Resort and Jungle Jims are just plain closing. Other places like Firelane, Lakeside (Newton Lake), Bobby J’s (Curve Inn) are trying a variety of carryout and delivery services. That is all on a trial basis, this is unprecidented.

I just saw on the noon news that they will all have to close tomorrow as part of the governor’s order that all non-essential businesses have to close.

When I was in Crivitz Thursday it was business as usual at places like the dollar stores and the Piggly Wiggly. The shelves at the Pig were pretty bare of some items. Bread was just about gone, TP, eggs, most of the meat and dairy were about cleaned out late in the day.

Both Vilas and Oneida Counties came out with this delcaration late this week. I posted it on the Crivitz Area Talk FaceBook page and started quite a discussion. Take a look.

I can tell you that their letter might be a little late. A lot of people already headed north when their work shut down for at least a week and likely much longer. I understand the desire to limit new exposure and the elderly population and limited medical resources things. I can’t say that I blame the people that did come north. I would have too. If nothing else I’d get some inside work done around the up-north house.

The only good thing about bars and restaurants being closed down, other than the obvious limiting the spread of the dreaded disease, is that this came in March and not in summer or during a peak tourism season. That would be just devastationg for a lot of area businesses. Hopefully we get this figured out soon.

There is some hope in two directions. One is that spring is coming soon and cold and flu season is just about over. Viruses don’t do well with heat and humidity. The second is that a couple of the quinine based malria drugs are showing promise both as a preventative and a treatment. Like I said, hopefully we get this figured out soon.

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We had a rainstorm line up just right over the area last Thursday night that ‘trained’ heavy rain showers right over us for quite a while. The radar returns estimated about 1.5″ for the areas that got trained. It is probably good that it wasn’t snow.

We had kind of a brutal winter. It started in October and early November and caught a lot of people by surprise. I was one of those people.

My camper never got winterized before it froze up too much to drain the water system. Usually I was ok until mid-November. Thanks to an early cold snap it froze up in late October. I am not looking forward to finding out how much damage that caused.

Along that same line a lot of fall projects never got finished, and I only got about half as much firewood cut as I wanted to before the snow came. There is a lot to do once the snow goes away and the ground firms up. Right now we have anywhere from no snow in sunny spots to 12-18″ in sheltered areas.

Around Thanksgiving we had wet heavy snow bow down trees and cause power outages. It happened again right before the snowmobile season started. There are going to be a lot of small trees and branches to clean up once the snow and mud go away.

In late February and early March we were right at critical snow load on a lot of roofs when the thawing started. We have made a lot of progress on that, but it is very dependent on how much sun that roof got. There has been limited temperature melting, most has been done by the sun. In shaded and sheltered areas there is still a lot of snow.

Some sheltered driveways have turned to wicked ice from the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle.The sunny area on my driveway is a little muddy but passable. The rest is all ice and snow.

I am not expecting a bad mud season this year because there is not much frost in the ground. We had a good start freezing the ground in November, but heavy snow came right as it was getting good. We never had any really deep freeze stretches to freeze the ground through the snow. There is some frost in the ground, but not much.

At that point a lot of places will be spared the really deep frost-out mud or major flooding as the snow melts. I’ve seen deep frost years where the driveway was over a foot deep mud while the frost was coming out. Last week I was only sinking in a couple of inches in muddy spots. Some of this depends on how deep the frost was driven into the soil by plowing or traffic. There are some ugly driveways and cars parked out by the road.

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be mud. We had a couple of very wet years, and we have a lot of high moisture snow pack to melt. The swamps and low spots are pretty full and the ground is saturated.

This leads me to the whitewater rafting season ahead. They start rafting on the first weekend in April if the ice on the river goes out in time. I am not sure how much ice that they had to portage, but there were kayakers on the river yesterday.

Water level-wise we are in for a fantastic whitewater rafting season. The back to back wet years have charged our aquifers and wetlands really heavily.

There are two parts to the river’s flow, the base flow from the spring creeks and swamps that is always there, and runoff. The Peshtigo counts on a lot of runoff for its peak water levels.

With the aquifers charged and the wetlands full that base flow is going to be much higher than normal. In my opinion that will make it where it is just about a sure thing that we will have good water levels every weekend through spring and early summer. Add in a massive snow pack and we are in for a wild spring season on the river.

Eventually the virus madness will calm down. It will be nice when it does. Right now we are not missing much. There is still 1-2 feet of snow in the woods, it is mud season and there isn’t much to do with all of the taverns and restaurants closed. You aren’t missng much.

Have a good one and thank you for visiting!

RJB