Spring thaw… in January!

I slept through a windy rain storm last night and woke up to find most of our snow is gone and our driveway is passable again!

Jeff had a great idea that we should take a drive before football came on this afternoon.

Here are some of our photos:

The backroads ranged from thick ice with water on it (treacherous) to wet gravel to under water!

I’m not sure there will be much of this driveway left by spring!

Jeff showed me the new boat launch on one of the small local lakes. I think it might have been damaged by the heavy rains and flood a bit, but now we have a new lake we can get our boat into this summer for fishing! 

This lake is popular for ice fishing. We’ve been planning an afternoon ice fishing, but this ice has a little too much water on it for my liking. I think we’ll wait until it is cold again!

There were a family of grouse out to get their grit on the road. Jeff got this great photo of one of them:

Then we headed up to Highway 104 where they are working on Phase 2 (3?) of the highway twinning project.  Oops! There are at least 5 pieces of heavy machinery under water in the river today. There was a bit of an ice dam, and after the heavy rain and melt over night, the river is really overflowing.

I’m thinking the construction foreman might have a grumpy day on Monday morning.

Look at this baseball field!

We didn’t go unscathed from the overnight wind storm. Our chimney cap came off again for the wood stove! 

Our chimney sweep told us last time this happened that it was safe to use, but we found there was way too much of a draft and it felt like fire was out of control, so I think we’ll live on the electric baseboard heat until the chimney sweep can get pop it back on and re-secure it.