Breakup...

 Not much going on lately, just watching the snow melt and turn apparently solid ground into slimy mud. That's breakup for you. Now, with almost no snow left on the trail, it's time to haul the sleds up to the shed and put'em away for the summer.

It seemed like just yesterday there was slush on the road and I was scraping/plowing snow every day. Now the roads almost dry and the water's flowing in the ditches again. So apparently all the time spent pushing the berms back and scraping the slush off was worth it.

The upper dog yard's (to the right) been scraped off and is rapidly drying; pretty soon we'll be moving the dogs up there. Kind of marginal photo quality, the sun just wasn't cooperating.

But the dogs don't seem to mind breakup. They run around, race through the mud, and play in the remaining snow patches; it's all good times when they're off on a free run.

More Out and About...

The weather has been crazy the last few weeks, a few days of fifty degrees that starts melting all the snow and ice, then it drops down to the teens and everything freezes up again for a while. This has been happening since late March. Been alternating between scraping the slush off of the road with the tractor on the warmer days, then going out on the snow machine to haul in firewood when it's colder and the trails refreeze. So here's some pics...

My neighbor Butch, who lent me his wide-track Polaris to use for trail work, wanted to get out and see the trails, so we did a sno-go tour of the valley.

Butch used to run dogs here, but hadn't been out in the valley since he quit mushing.

Heading out to cut some firewood. There's lot of standing dead spruce in the valley.

After cutting down half a dozen dead trees, they're drug out to the trail and bucked up to about 6 feet long to fit on the sled.

Ready to haul the load back home. Since the trees are dead and the bark is peeling off, they don't need to be split and are great for starting fires in the wood stove.