Here we are again! A fairly uneventful summer, a VERY wet fall and a great start to winter lead me into hopefully what will be an active blogging season.
If this tells you anything, I haven't logged in since Blogger changed their posting interface...MUCH better than it was. I think I might actually be able to work with this!
That said, lets get started. As I mentioned the summer was fairly uneventful. We didn't really do a whole heck of a lot...work, eat and sleep. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but nothing really sticks out. I started a new Facebook group in late spring/early summer...it is called 'Northern Michigan Bigfoot Researchers'. It seemed like a good progression to our outdoor activities. We actually had a couple "squatch camps" (as we've begun to call them) where we went out to likely areas in Northern Michigan and gave it our all. We might just have chosen some poor times to go out...but we had no activity. We'll start again in the early spring.
Fall was a somewhat active time...we put our house up for sale. That has taken up the bulk of our time. Trying to get this in order for staging and letting people walk through has been more of a chore than I ever expected. Neither of us realized how much STUFF we have that needed to go before we felt comfortable having people walk though...not that we were afraid of theft or anything...but it sure made things look cluttered. I noted that it was a wet fall. We broke records for the amount of rainfall in October and November I believe. Significant rains fell. I believe we were over 12 inches in October and had a few more in November. Mid-November we started to see some of that turn into the white stuff! Yup, we had a good amount of snow on the ground in November!
I was dreaming of a White Thanksgiving...and we got it. Unfortunately, last night we had some warmer weather move through with some rain. A good portion of the snow that we had built up is now gone. Doh! Can't imagine it'll all go away between now and later today when temps are supposed to drop into the 20s and then then 10s for the next couple days. It doesn't appear that much system snow is headed our way in the immediate future...but with temps dropping quickly...hopefully the ol' lake effect snow machines will go into over drive. :) A guy can always hope right?
Anyway, that is a very brief synopsis of what has been going down...I'm hoping to have more time to do this as winter comes around. I have a few pictures I can post in the next week or so...I just need to get through them. :)
Keep your fingers crossed for good snows!
Derek
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Goodbye Winter 2012-13...Maybe?
So much for being a good blogger...after I got excited the last time I wrote I must have forgotten to start again. ;)
The winter that I spoke of? Well, it kicked into high gear in late February and into March...and then again in April...and then in May. May you say? Yes, May. I believe my last snowmobile ride was officially April 24th this year...I believe the latest I've ever ridden. Pretty wild for the crappy start we had! Back to May. We had a cold spell roll into town late last week...which led to some fairly intense snow over the weekend for some areas. It did snow really hard for a period of time at our house...but the high snowfall amount I believe was 3.3 inches up in Da Soo. The total there for May was 5.5 after that...the 2nd highest snowfall since 1924 when they received over 7 inches in May. So much for global warming eh?
I took a week off from work and did a bunch of clearing up at the land we bought last fall. I am doing it all by hand...loppers and a chain saw! Talk about a lot of work...but it gets me out into the woods; something I've missed for a few years now. (Hence the lack of blogging!) We are working toward planting pine trees along all of the property borders...just as reminder to us AND our neighbors that there are boundaries out in the sticks. I marked one side and the back with twine and tape...that'll hopefully stay up until I'm done planting the trees...I believe a deer ran into one line the other day...I'll have to check on that when I go back up.
Anyway...it's getting late but I wanted to write a quick note.
Goodnight from Northern Michigan,
Derek
The winter that I spoke of? Well, it kicked into high gear in late February and into March...and then again in April...and then in May. May you say? Yes, May. I believe my last snowmobile ride was officially April 24th this year...I believe the latest I've ever ridden. Pretty wild for the crappy start we had! Back to May. We had a cold spell roll into town late last week...which led to some fairly intense snow over the weekend for some areas. It did snow really hard for a period of time at our house...but the high snowfall amount I believe was 3.3 inches up in Da Soo. The total there for May was 5.5 after that...the 2nd highest snowfall since 1924 when they received over 7 inches in May. So much for global warming eh?
I took a week off from work and did a bunch of clearing up at the land we bought last fall. I am doing it all by hand...loppers and a chain saw! Talk about a lot of work...but it gets me out into the woods; something I've missed for a few years now. (Hence the lack of blogging!) We are working toward planting pine trees along all of the property borders...just as reminder to us AND our neighbors that there are boundaries out in the sticks. I marked one side and the back with twine and tape...that'll hopefully stay up until I'm done planting the trees...I believe a deer ran into one line the other day...I'll have to check on that when I go back up.
Anyway...it's getting late but I wanted to write a quick note.
Goodnight from Northern Michigan,
Derek
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Snowmobile trail addition...
Oh! As a quick side note...I heard that there is some progress getting a snowmobile trail between Alanson and M119 toward Petoskey. If anyone has information on that please share it with me so I can post it here to gather support. :)
-Derek
-Derek
Possibly a return on the horizon?
Yikes! Over a year since my last post? That doesn't seem real at all. I'm sure Blogger doesn't like though. Scary.
I had a pretty gnarly 2012...so I'm not going to even talk about it. But 2013 so far looks to be a bit better and that is where we will begin the new adventures.
To recap our 2012-13 winter so far, there has been little but a bunch of toying with snow lover's emotions. We had a good start in December after a fairly warm November. We got a bunch of snow a couple different times only to be followed by a week or two or warm and rain. Through January we experienced much of the same...but it has been quite a bit colder. We did lose most of our snow though and it has been a tough battle to get it back. Things are looking up though...it has pretty much been snowing for the past two weeks. We had a quick warm up at the beginning of this past week but it was thwarted by some fairly arctic air.
I mentioned in the past my Ski-Doo was wrecked and traded in for an ATV. That has gone well and the ATV gets used as much as we can use it...not much though. So this year I decided it was time to get the Yamaha back into commission. After a few years sitting in the garage it was either get it moving or get rid of it. I opted to have someone take a look at it for me. I took it to Highland Trails in Conway, MI to get a check up. I explained the over heating issue, the lack of power issue, and of course this year I couldn't get it started at all...it wasn't getting any gas. After a couple days down at their shop, I got the call that it was ready to rock and roll and was running fine. I could barely believe that...but I rode it home that night on some old Sta-bil gas. It didn't care much for that. ;) Since then (early January) I have ridden it it just about 150 miles. I've been being careful because I don't trust it completely yet. ;) It has never left me stranded...but I figure this would be the time. So far so good though...no over heating and no lack of power. I switched back to an old Yamaha belt that I had...and she runs like new. VERY good news for the blog too....since I should actually have something to share now.
I tried a while back to regroup this blog and start to study some local history...that fell apart after my issues in 2012. I doubt that I will take the blog in that direction at this point...just because it is so time consuming and I'm a busy fella. I will continue to keep it themed toward the outdoors. I guess I'd also like to take it into a bit of a gun advocate direction too...with all of the non-sense going on with our current administration and their anti-gun sentiment. Gun grabs don't end well for anyone...and hopefully people start to realize that.
This is more than I've written for over a year...so I suppose I'll end it for now. I have the sled back so I should have some pictures in the near future...that will probably be toward next weekend hopefully. I have learned there might be a winter camping event next weekend so I might even have some pictures from that to share.
Keep squatchin'!
-Derek
I had a pretty gnarly 2012...so I'm not going to even talk about it. But 2013 so far looks to be a bit better and that is where we will begin the new adventures.
To recap our 2012-13 winter so far, there has been little but a bunch of toying with snow lover's emotions. We had a good start in December after a fairly warm November. We got a bunch of snow a couple different times only to be followed by a week or two or warm and rain. Through January we experienced much of the same...but it has been quite a bit colder. We did lose most of our snow though and it has been a tough battle to get it back. Things are looking up though...it has pretty much been snowing for the past two weeks. We had a quick warm up at the beginning of this past week but it was thwarted by some fairly arctic air.
I mentioned in the past my Ski-Doo was wrecked and traded in for an ATV. That has gone well and the ATV gets used as much as we can use it...not much though. So this year I decided it was time to get the Yamaha back into commission. After a few years sitting in the garage it was either get it moving or get rid of it. I opted to have someone take a look at it for me. I took it to Highland Trails in Conway, MI to get a check up. I explained the over heating issue, the lack of power issue, and of course this year I couldn't get it started at all...it wasn't getting any gas. After a couple days down at their shop, I got the call that it was ready to rock and roll and was running fine. I could barely believe that...but I rode it home that night on some old Sta-bil gas. It didn't care much for that. ;) Since then (early January) I have ridden it it just about 150 miles. I've been being careful because I don't trust it completely yet. ;) It has never left me stranded...but I figure this would be the time. So far so good though...no over heating and no lack of power. I switched back to an old Yamaha belt that I had...and she runs like new. VERY good news for the blog too....since I should actually have something to share now.
I tried a while back to regroup this blog and start to study some local history...that fell apart after my issues in 2012. I doubt that I will take the blog in that direction at this point...just because it is so time consuming and I'm a busy fella. I will continue to keep it themed toward the outdoors. I guess I'd also like to take it into a bit of a gun advocate direction too...with all of the non-sense going on with our current administration and their anti-gun sentiment. Gun grabs don't end well for anyone...and hopefully people start to realize that.
This is more than I've written for over a year...so I suppose I'll end it for now. I have the sled back so I should have some pictures in the near future...that will probably be toward next weekend hopefully. I have learned there might be a winter camping event next weekend so I might even have some pictures from that to share.
Keep squatchin'!
-Derek
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