CLOUDLAND CABIN JOURNAL - Febuary 2010 Cloudland Journal Archives, Cloudland Cabin Info Page
Cloudland Cabin Cam, February 8, 7:35am - FOUR INCHES of new snow overnight with more to come!
HAPPY MONDAY! |
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UPDATED ON THE 4th - the cabin is silent tonight 02/01/10 A few photos from the past couple of days...
The Buffalo River (above) and Whitaker Creek (below)
Amber and The Fat Cat
Wolf Moon rising on Saturday night
Sonya, Amber, and Kyle
The setting moon through the trees at the Gallery early this morning
02/02/10 It is a clear, starkly, beautiful night in the wilderness tonight! The moon has not appeared yet but will soon top the eastern horizon and send its moonbeams throughout the land. Right now the black sky looks down on a landscape that remains blanketed with white. During the daytime we can see so much farther into the woods, and so much more detail is visible with the snow background. Giant chunks of sandstone that have separated from the big bluffline are well defined - and I want to go visit each and every one of them! (I have seen to several, but it has been a while.) We can see individual logs that have fallen a half mile away. If there were large critters out there moving about we could see them too.
Speaking of that, I failed to report about the tracks I saw in the snow the other day when I was exploring down along the Buffalo River in the deep snow. I saw many sets of tracks crisscrossing my path, but this one set in particular got my attention and kept it for a while. There were four prints in a set, evenly spaced, and probably that of a deer - although a deer normally will make a good impression at the bottom of the snow but I could not see any outline down in there. So four feet/tracks, then NOTHING in the snow for 6-10 feet, and then another set of four tracks. Simple - just a deer that had bounded from one spot to the next. But it continued this way - one set of tracks, then nothing for a long while, then another set of tracks. Sometimes the break was 15-20 FEET apart! And the funny part was that the tracks did not disturb the snow like they were made by a bounding deer or other animal - they just looked like a normal track. At one point there was a pile of bright red blood, but no sign of a struggle around them. More than once the tracks began on one side of a downed tree and then nothing for 15-20 until the other side of the tree, and no branches or other parts of the downed tree had been disturbed (still covered with snow). So this deer or whatever had to have jumped mighty high and far in order to completely clear these downed trees. The snow was deeper than normal for around here, but I would not think it was deep enough to force a deer to leap with every step, which is what it looked like. Eventually the trail joined with another trail and I lost the pristine nature of the tracks. I would love to have been up on the hillside behind a tree watching!
The snow has pretty much shut us down around here as far as going anywhere is concerned, especially once the county plowed the main road and then our own county road 406 - I would rather drive on snow than on scraped snow! What happens is that the plow never actually scrapes all the way down to the bare roadbed, and so there is a packed bit of snow/slush/ice that remains. When it melts a little bit and freezes during the night it create a skating rink of some really SLICK roadway! They had school yesterday but we kept Amber home - no way I was going to drive down the big hill into Boxley Valley, especially since we did not know if there would be a bus waiting down in Boxley to pick her up or not. Same deal today - the roads up here remain ice and snow covered and frozen this morning so we kept Amber at home.
But I did venture out to head into town early this afternoon. And I only made it about a mile before I got stuck - actually this is the first time I've been stuck in the snow in probably 20 years or longer (I did get stuck in my driveway during an ice storm once, but that was solid ice). Luckily I had a pair of chains with me and 30 minutes later I even managed to get them attached. I was on a slight hill that had been plowed and was solid ice. My car was going nowhere, except sideways. With the chains on I continue to slide sideways, although it was more of the front of the car moving than the back - I ended up doing a 180 degree spin in the middle of the narrow road! (NOT what I had in mind, but it worked!) I was able to eventually get turned around and back on the road again and made it into town - breaking one of the cable chains in the process.
Cave Mountain Road is a real mess right now and it is easy to slide off of it at any point. I made it home OK tonight, but the road will be a solid sheet of ice in the morning. That fact, along with Amber having to get up at 4am to give us enough time to drive all the way out the back way to Red Star, then around to Fallsville, and finally down into Boxley in time to meet the bus, we've decided to keep her at home for another day. It used to be easy to figure this out - they ran a school "bus" up here on Cave Mountain, and when the driver would not drive due to the ice and snow, Amber would not go to school. But they removed that bus route this year and so it is all up to us. I'm becoming more of a chicken in my old age I guess, but I don't think it is worth possible death, injury, or property damage just to get her to school. She actually has school projects she continues to work on here, and being the 4.0 student that she is I have a feeling she would much rather be in school anyway. (That would NOT have been the case with me when I was in school!)
Speaking of going 180 degrees, we have just flip-flopped our work stations here in the cabin and so now I am working at Pam's spot and she at mine. (And both of our chairs and computers are identical.) I get them mixed up sometimes. Pair that with the fact I continue to have issues with my left arm and can't use it for most of my computing (which I do with a pen and drawing tablet - I don't own a mouse, other than those down in the basement that we are trying to catch!). And we are redoing the individual-order shipping department that has taken over the "drawing" room next to the library/office here at the cabin. We haven't actually had to buy much in the way of new fixtures, but have been removing a lot of older ones and moving the rest around - that means our front porch now looks like it should - filled with all sorts of furniture! (although still no couches or washing machines yet!). Once the snow melts off a little bit I'm going to haul all of that up to the tractor shed for storage and we'll have our front porch back again.
On the photo side of things I am waiting for more rain so that I can head out to explore new waterfalls - I've got something like 20-25 new ones on my list already, including several that are really neat and pretty easy to get to and quite surprising locations - I can't wait for high water!!! Bring on the RAIN...
By the way, even though I think that Amber built a pretty nice snowman in the kayak the other day, it looks like a LOT of folks in the school district did a terrific job too - there are at least 100 entries in the local snowman contest, and some of them are absolutely amazing!
02/04/10 An amazingly weird and beautiful weather day out there today, all day long! It actually started off yesterday - the girls abandoned me and sped off to spend the night at granny's house in Jasper. Amber had missed a lot of school this week and really needed to get back to class (very strange kid!), but the roads up here on the mountain continue to be unsafe at 5am in the morning - frozen solid and very dangerous. So the girls decided on a preemptive strike and they drove into town while the roads were thawing - a bloody, muddy, slushy mess for sure, but they made it OK. So it was just Aspen and I alone in the cabin last night - Lucy was in her "cave" where she likes to spend a lot of time.
During the night we got a good amount of sleet and freezing rain and the roads were really bad. In fact there were at least four school buses that got stranded on the way to school! Turned out that a lot of kids did not make it to school today, but AMBER DID! And I guess they invented this word for a situation just like this - but the irony of it all was that after Amber made all that effort to get to school, she got sick and had to leave school! Luckily they retreated back to granny's house since the roads were still pretty much impassible. I tried to take the mail out and could not get more than about 100 yards from the cabin in my car before I had to give up and turn around - melting snow creates sheets of ice the next morning.
But all day today it RAINED, and the temp was above freezing. The ground all over was covered with six inches of snow that had not melted yet, and all day long the rain created baby clouds down in the canyon far below. And those babies would rise up and move around, chasing each other, playing, trying to figure out where they were going to go to live. The dramatic landscape scene was in motion and changing all day long until darkness arrived here just a little while ago.
I went out several times - up to feed the wild cats that are living in our tractor shed (the girls saw a pair of BOBCATS near there yesterday), back up to the shed to get some lumber and other stuff, back and forth to the gallery - each time felt great, almost warm, as the light rain felt quite refreshing. But the ground remained frozen, or at least covered with snow and ice and slush. Towards the late afternoon the rain had softened the ice up enough that I made a second attempt to drive out - this time to pick up the mail. Cave Mountain Road is a real mess, and I recommend that you AVOID it until things dry out - which might be another week or two.
I spent my day here trying to learn how to become right-handed, and not doing a very good job of it. I endured the most painful experience I've ever had in a doctor's office yesterday as I got two injections into the center of my ailing left elbow. The staff said the last guy show got these injections last week fainted part way through the procedure - great, that really cheered me up - I HATE needles anyway! This was just the first installment of three of these types of injections - I'm hoping if this first one does not work then we move right on over to #4, which is elbow surgery. I should know in a month. In the meantime I'm not able to use my left arm for much, and being left-handed that is somewhat of a handicap. My lovely bride already does quite a bit more then she gets credit for and should be doing, but now she is going to have to step up and take charge and start yelling at me to SIT DOWN and let her do it!
I am not able to write at the moment - with a pen that is - and hardly with a keyboard either. I'm not supposed to grip anything, especially small stuff like an autograph pen. So if you order a book this week and the autograph looks kind of funny, you will know why (that is not the actual reason - I just have sloppy penmanship - but I'll use it as an excuse as long as I can!).
One funny thing about my computer skills. I don't own a mouse - I use a writing tablet for everything that a mouse normally is used for. Guess what - I'm helpless without the writing tablet! I swiped Pam's mouse while she has been gone, but knew she would return one day and want it back. Then I remembered that I did indeed have a mouse - one that works with the writing tablet. The problem would be where to locate it - I keep everything, but that was the issue - there were at least 25 boxes from computer equipment alone on the shelves. But I did find it, and now I am able to navigate the computer with my right hand while my left arm hangs out on a pillow in my lap.
It is quiet and lonely in this big old cabin in the middle of the wilderness without the girls here. The silence is broken only by Aspen's snoring, which echoes off the log walls. Bring on the RAIN and the melody that comes with it to send me into slumber....
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