Buried in snow

Boy did we get a winter snowstorm yesterday. It was hard to tell how much snow actually fell because the wind blew fiercely for 24 hours, from the North-East, instead of the usual North-West. But we got at least a foot of snow, and the wind blew up some drifts that we could hardly believe! In some places, the drifts are 8-10 feet deep, not piles of snow from snowblowing or banks along the road, just wind blown drifts! We haven't had any major melts yet this winter, so it is all accumulated.

Here's the barn, you actually cannot see the back end of it so there is no where to push the snow, but we learned from last winter and made our roofs strong enough to handle this kind of weight, even if we get some rain. Pilgrim's barn door is on the left there, he has a bit of a slope down into his semi-submerged basement level pad now. But boy does the snow keep the wind out, and it is great insulation. It was blowing a gale yesterday, but inside the barn it was perfectly calm and warm.

Even out in the windswept fields, there is 4 feet of snow, the top rail of this fence is buried and it was 4 feet high.

Some of the snow sculptures created by the wind.

Anyone else ever see these little guys. They are hard to see because they are so small, but I call them snowfleas. They come out for a day or two in the early spring. I don't know whether they come out of the ground, or out of the wood, but they cover the snow like soot. In good record keeping fashion, I recorded when they came out last spring, and again this year. Perhaps they are our "groundhog" because they didn't come out until March 22 last year, and we had a late spring with snow on the ground into the second week of May. And this year they are predicting a warm and early spring, and these little guys were out on February 16.

Note: Just found out what these little guys are, amazingly, they are called "Snow Fleas", not just my nickname for them. Even more amazing is that they eat decaying matter, as well as roundworms. So having these little guys around will help us keep our parasite levels low in the pastures and barns. Still don't know if they are harbringers of spring, but I suspect that they are.