Thursday 3-29-18

March Mud-ness

Greetings and welcome!

We are having a gradual spring thaw this year. The sun is warm and the days have gotten into the 40s and 50s, but cold nights in the teens and twenties have kept a lid on things thawing out to some extent.

Just how thawed out any given spot is depends on its sun exposure. The sunny spot at the end of my driveway is a little soft still, but the deep mud has come and gone. A few feet away where a stand of spruce trees shade the driveway there is still a 2-3” ice base and up to a foot of snow remaining. The partially shaded area from the bare branches of maple trees has plentiful snow in some spots and deep mud in the driveway.

One of my favorite things to do is to go and explore forest roads. That is out for at least a couple of weeks, and most likely for most of April.

Spring thaw also means that the snowmobile and ATV trails are closed for a while to let the ground to firm up. No one knows when they will reopen, that all depends on how fast that it all thaws out. Usually they reopen the first weekend in May, but it could go a couple of weeks either way.

We had a cold and snowless start to winter so we will have a pretty deep frost this year. There was also plenty of moisture in the ground when it froze. Between that and the gradual thaw don’t be surprised if spring breakup takes an extra weekend.

While that is not great news for the ATV trails, it is great news for whitewater rafting. One of the reasons that the water gets high in the spring is the snow melt. The real magic comes with the frozen ground. Any snow melt or rain runs off to the river quickly instead of being absorbed into the ground or being used by trees and plants. The river’s rise from an inch of rain is much bigger in April than it is in July.

The Peshtigo River started to break up some of its ice by the bridge at Kosir’s. There is an open area upstream, and the ice actually broke up for 100 yards downstream. Like the driveway, that has been a gradual thaw.

That is ok, the river isn’t quite ready yet. There is some ice to break up still, but that isn’t the big issue. The watershed 20-40 miles north and west is still quite frozen. When I was in the upper reaches last week there are places that still have knee deep snow in the woods. The wetlands are still frozen tight, and were very full when it froze up. Again we had a cold start to winter and a deep frost.

It is great that it will all still be there for us when the season opens, and I think that we have a lot to look forward to.

We are in the same cold pattern that we started winter with. The Canadian high pressure has been shielding us from big storms, but it has also brought us colder than normal nights. It has been common in the recent past to see 12 or 15 for a low temperatures. The sun still warms us up into the upper 30s and sometimes mid or upper 40s, but the nights remain cold.

So far that has kept the spring bug population in check. So far I have seen exactly one gnat. It is typical to have a lot of them when the days first start to warm up. So far so good.

Looking for a seasonal RV campsite? Silver Cliff Camp has a couple available as do Hilltop Resort and Curve Inn Resort. Compared to other resort areas the rent is very cheap. In the case of Curve Inn and Hilltop Resort the rental is annual and the road stays plowed, so you could use the RV for snowmobiling too.

That is it for tonight. I will be back more as spring progresses.
Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB