Winter stuff...

This time of year, the days are short, maybe five hours of daylight, and it's usually too cold to do much outside. But this year's different, seems like we've had as much warm weather, well above zero at least, as sub-zero cold. So this is what we've been doing...

Running dogs again, now that the trail's finally back in after the big rain/snow storms around Christmas.

After shoveling moose holes on the trail, we got a nice shot of the setting sun reflecting off the clouds in valley...

 Fixing the Ski Doo, the third time in the last four years it's broken down. When you spend more time working on it than riding, well maybe it's time to look for a newer one?

And of course the sunsets are great this time of year with the low angle of the sun...

Just maybe, in a few weeks or so, it'll be warm enough to not dress up like the Pillsbury doughboy!

New Shoes...

Well not exactly, but finally got the new (for me) slightly used snow shoes finished. While the problem with the first shoe was grinding off the old rivets to replace the front decking, the reassembly went fine. The second one was the opposite, the old rivets came off easy and new ones went in, well not so much.

Here's the finished snow shoes. The pile of scrap in the middle of the bench are the wasted rivets; it took maybe two dozen rivets to fasten the ten holes. For some reaosn, the head wouldn't expand sufficiently to hold the washer on the bottom of the shoe. I did the first few just by holding them in place by hand, then used C-clamps, and finally vise grips. Not sure why they didn't expand enough. Anyway, the shoes are done now and I'll try'em out tomorrow.

I did get a new pair of boots last month and here I'm trying them out on Jack Black. While most of our earlier cats, like Ruty, loved to get their belly rubs, Jack usually takes offense and can attack with claws and teeth. No cats or boots were harmed in this exercise.

Snowshoes and Miscreant Moose at Twenty Below...

After all the big snows ended, we got about 4 1/2 ft for the month, it was mostly plowing and shoveling snow for a week or so. Then it was time to put the sled dog trail back in. I did get the dogs out for one run on the sled before the big rainstorm hit, but since then there was nowhere to run them with all the ice and snow covering the trails. Tried to get out on the Ski Doo the other day, but my neighbor came by, told me his truck was stuck in the road, so spent the rest of the afternoon helping him. Then the temps dropped to well below zero, the Ski Doo is hard to start when it's real cold, so figured it'd be easier to just snowshoe the trails in. Well that was a good idea maybe twenty or thirty years ago but not so much now. After three days on the snowshoes, I'd only gotten a half a mile of trail in. But the worst part was that every time I went back out, the moose had wandered down the trail, stomping tracks (post holing) the trail. When I went out today, not only did they stomp in what I did yesterday, they apparently followed behind me and stomped in some of the trail I'd fixed today. I think I'm done with this for awhile.

So this is what you look like after snowshoeing at twenty below. There's probably better ways to spend your time; I think I'll look into it.