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