The wind's fury

This morning dawned calm and cold. It was peaceful in the wake of yesterday's storm.

K and I headed out with me on the snowbike which rolled easily in the tracks that I'd worked so hard to lay down yesterday.

The animals have either evacuated our forest or are holed up. I saw no paw or hoof prints in my tracks from yesterday although coyotes visited our clearing last night.

Several of you have asked how our dogs react to wildlife in our clearing. If the dogs are in the house, they react with ferocious barking and raised hackles if they see anything bigger than a bunny in the clearing. If the coyotes howl, K barks at them but R joins them, singing with his head thrown back and his nose toward the sky. I have seen signs that the coyotes and dogs have a territorial competition underway. They each mark over top of the other's urine and scat. We're careful to leash the dogs near dawn and dusk. However, recently, the dogs almost took me for a long ride when they spotted a coyote fleeing our clearing while on leash. I barely hung on to my lunging dogs, and my spine paid a price the next day.

Out on the trails today, it looked as if no animals had moved around since the storm so my unattended wildlife cameras probably would have yielded nothing if I'd checked them. I go through periods after storms when I have no idea where the wildlife has gone. I do know that the animals don't follow their "usual" routes or visit their "usual" haunts when the snow is deep.

K spent a long time romping in the woods yesterday so I took her home early today to avoid stressing her paw too much.

In the ten minutes that I spent indoors with K before heading out again solo, mother nature unleashed her indomitable power. The evil wind began jetting off of the Divide, taking our foot of snow and whipping it through the air.

During one particularly ferocious round of gale, I propped my bike and stood still, waiting it out with my face hidden from the assault of airborne needle-like icy snow crystals. When relative calm returned, I looked up, and my bike had been floored by the wind. The wind's jet-like noise had drowned out any sound of my bike falling.

At that moment, I decided that it was good day to cut my outing short. I headed toward home.

A familiar landscape looked alien whenever the wind carried billows of snow into the air. On my way home, all trace that I'd ever skiied or ridden my bike over that same path had been erased by blowing snow. The wind managed that feat in a matter of minutes.

Winter can be brutal. We humans, dogs, cats, and horses with warm homes have it easy. We can choose when to go out into the storms while others have no choice.