Archive for ‘March, 2009’

Oh what a beautiful morning!

It snowed late yesterday and last night. It started as an off and on mini-blizzard and then settled into great clumps of flakes by the time I went to bed. It dropped below freezing and froze the clumpy snow to everything. Beautiful!

These photos were taken this morning as the sun was clearing the mountain tops, about 1/2 hour after official sunrise.

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Getting there

After a couple of days above freezing, we are making some progress with the snow melt. The actual driveway is showing…

I might see the walk to the garage soon. I suppose I’m paying more attention to the melting as I keep looking at the huge mounds of snow from the roof shoveling and driveway plowing and wondering exactly how long it will take for them to go away. But finding it interesting that they “shrink” from underneath and seem to take on a bit of hollowness. I’m sure there is a physics type explanation…but I remember from years past that they will shrink fairly rapidly until they get to a last little bit which then seems to take forever to disappear.

The sun fought to make an appearance yesterday and on last evening’s walk even found a few holes to shine through, lighting the mountain tops briefly.

At the north end of the range, snow squalls moved over the mountains and partway down to the lower foothills.

It is still technically Winter for a few more days, but Spring is trying – we are getting there!

Another day at the lake

Saturday, noonish, Karl and I headed to Wayfarer’s State Park for a walk on the beach. I was surprised to find the parking area filled with trucks and boat trailers. There is still not much of a parking area as the primary day use parking has not been plowed. On this day, every spot designated for vehicle and trailer was full as well as every other plowed spot.

The Jeep, though, is no stranger to snow, so we parked in the day lot, in the snow. Two men near were readying a fishing boat so I asked about the “crowd”. There is a fishing tournament on. It is a yearly thing. They laughed at my saying that I was surprised at the number of boaters on a cold, gray day: “Any day is a good day to fish” was their reply. They went on to tell me that they were not in the tournament, but that they recognized most of the trucks and trailers as friends of theirs that were participating.

Karl and I walked toward the lake and watched them launch on an icy ramp. It was relatively warm at 36 but the combination of snow on the road and ramp, water splashing as each launched…and a few were already done for the day and pulling out, made the ramp very icy. 4wd and chains were the order of the day.

But aside from the boat launch, Karl and I had the rest of the park to ourselves.

Another day at the lake.

Small Town Doin’s

As a small business person (VERY small…sole proprietor and only person) I joined the Bigfork Chamber of Commerce when I moved to Bigfork in late 2002. The Chamber is active in many community functions and organizes most of them. Decoration Day at Christmas time is one of the many. Coming up are “Clean our Fork” which is a turn out for spring litter pick up – we meet at one of the local members’ for a pancake breakfast, are assigned areas to pick up and off we go. Just like Decoration Day, enough turn out that we “git er done” in short order and then we meet again for lunch… All activities include food and drink – we don’t do anything hungry or thirsty!

It is a fun group! The nature of Bigfork’s topography is such that there is very little “town” housing. Most of us live rurally in the surrounding area. Chamber functions as well as town functions are always well attended.

Once a month, the Chamber has a “Sundowner”. A Chamber business hosts an open house with food and drink, naturally. Starting at 5 p.m. we gather, eat, sip and talk, share announcements about new or expanding services, promotions, upcoming events and finish with a small raffle for prizes donated by the host.

Yesterday evening was this month’s Sundowner, hosted by the Bigfork branch of Rocky Mountain Bank.

The bank is right next to the Chamber office and those poor people in the bank look towards the lake all day while they are working…you can see a bit of the lake past the Dairy Queen sign in the first photo. The Diary Queen gets a bit of the view also as do a number of businesses, including another bank that “step” down the grade along Montana Highway 35.

And that temperature of 26??? It made us all giddy with relief after the last several days of arctic cold. And 26 was at just after 6 p.m. – sunset is 7:40ish right now. We were all smiles and “hey, it is almost Spring” as we gathered.

Although Karl did not come in for the festivities, he did ride along in the Jeep. We arrived home, passing our UPS guy on the way and found he had been to our house…

And he didn’t forget Karl!

Small Town doin’s – I love it all!