A week or so ago, Mike was praising the rain they got in TX. Want some snow? Kind of thinking that if you want to truck some down there nobody would really care if some was missing. We got our first snow in early Nov., about 5 inches. Pretty much every week since then we have got anywhere between 5-12 inches added to the mess. All across ND there were record amounts of snow in the month of Dec. Right now we have received somewhere around 48". We dodged a bullet last night, we were supposed to get somewhere around 10-12" but it went around us, we just got a couple inches. Now the wind is supposed to pick up and blow it around. We haven't had a winter like this since 97-98 when we got somewhere around 80" for the entire winter. The drifts are near the top of the corrals. The waterer is just about under the snow. I am running out of room to push the stuff. The trail getting to the hay drifts in worse each time. Why does anybody really want to live in these conditions?

The really hard thing to think about is what is going to happen in the spring when all this starts to melt. Prior to the snow we were dumped on with about 8-10" of rain. The ground froze up saturated so it won't take any moisture from the snow. When this melts down, I can't imagine the mud season we will have. Calving will be real fun this spring.

But on a positive note, we are only 50 days until calving season, 101 days until green grass, and 140 days until foaling season. Life will get more interesting and better.

Sounds just like northern Minnesota. Snow up to our ears, and now we have a whole week of not
above 0 wheather. 'Bought froze my face off just walking to get the news paper this morning. A lovely, balmy, breezy, -32 morning. Doing chores was a joke. I bundled up from head to toe and still was uncomfortable. My horses do amazingly well in this kinda air though.

We need moisture in any form we can get it. We are now in a terrible drought. If rain doesn't come soon this Summer will be a disaster. It's cold, dry and the wind is blowing right now.

I think we turned the corner. Yesterday morning I went out to do chores and it was a cool -42 actual below zero day. The hyraulics on the tractor really didn't even warm up at all. Hate to run things in that type of cold, steel gets brittle and things wear out faster and break sooner. Oils and greases never soften as they should. Factor in the wind chill and we were somewhere around -65. It warmed up to a -20 during the day. This morning it was 0 and tomorrow we are supposed to be about +30. That my friends will be a warm up of 72 degrees in about 48 hours. Like we say, if you don't like the weather in ND, stick around it will change in a couple of hours.

Wish I could send you folks some of this moisture Mike. We are going to have plenty come spring time.

I received this in my mal and immediately thought of you NW

That picture has been going around. Pretty good. I emailed that to a friend of mine that lives in New Zealand. She had to ask if I was joking or serious. I HOPE she knows that was a joke.

I do have a picture from back in the 70s of a ND ranche that was going through powder snow leading his horse. In the picture the horse looked about like the deer. Remember, that picture was taken prior to even a thought of Photo Shop. I'll see if I can find it and get it posted.

I'd love to see it NW. I wish there were newspaper archives on the net going back to 1978 when I lived in CO....we had 110 inches of snow on the level and had to dig the horses out and put them in our garage...we also made the Steamboat Springs news when we rode our horses into town as most the roads were impassable for vehicles due to all the snow, the plows couldn't keep up.
My mom has the clipping somewhere, I'll have to see if I can take a readable photo of it and post it sometime.