The Amazing Elasticity of Snow

It was warm Saturday - several degrees above freezing.  The sun was out, and there was virtually no wind.  I was so warm snowshoeing that I was happily sweating wearing only old overall leggings that work great for cross country skiing or snowshoing, a super lightweight moisture-wicking shirt, and an unzipped low-tech Barbie-pink fleece that everyone picks on me for.  (It IS incredibly bubblegum).  Hat and mittens were stuffed in my camera case.

Temperature perception varies dramatically, though, I admit.  I snowshoed past one woman swathed to the eyeballs, wearing a calf-length puffy down coat with its hood up over a hat, a huge scarf, mittens, fluffy boots, and insulated pants.  She made me hot just to look at, and I'm usually cold!

I don't know if they're any more impartial at judging winter temperatures, but it was warm enough that there were bugs out flying around in a beam of sunlight, which surprised me.  I know there are a number of varieties of bugs that like it cold, but I'm not used to seeing anything flying in swarms in the winter.  Only a couple showed up in the photo, but there were several dozen of them:

It was, of course, also warm enough to melt some snow.  While wandering along, I spotted the following:

It looks to me like that strip of snow used to lie along the vine, and had slithered around and draped itself off it by the time I came by.  It immediately called to mind an incredible snow swath that once graced the railing of the deck at our old townhouse.  We'd had a big lake effect snowstorm followed by several days with highs slightly above freezing, and the snow on the railing gracefully slid off the edge and stretched itself downward in an unsupported arc:

Honest - it wasn't formed around a garland or string of Christmas lights or anything - that's 100% snow. Here's another view:

It stayed like that for several days, creeping ever so slowly downward.  Eventually it rained, and the snow ribbon was sadly no more.  Cool though, huh?

Honestly, everything about snow seems odd to me if I think about it hard enough.  The very idea of the landscape being covered in all that stuff seems strange.  It's like how a familiar word can suddenly seem spelled wrong if one thinks about it too hard.  I may be mighty used to snow, but it still surprises me sometimes.

If I had to guess, I would say the snow bending off branches and railings happens most often when the snowfall has come down as big fluffy flakes rather than granules or graupel.  Those pretty flakes with all their little jags and points wind up becoming interlocked as they fall and compress.  Then when it gets warm and they start to melt, they still hang together and melt as a mass rather than just as individual flakes, giving the clump of interlocked flakes the ability to droop, fold, hang and stretch.  Any snow scientists out there who can confirm my guesswork?  Anybody ever quantifiably measured the elasticity of snow?  I bet someone has...

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Ghostly Snow Prints

I've only really begun to develop an appreciation for tracking critters in snow.  It's not that I didn't think it was interesting before, but more that I never stopped to think about just how much one can figure out about what a creature did, and sometimes even thought, just based on the impressions its feet/tail/wings/belly left in the snow.

And if you think you can't figure out what an animal was thinking based on its tracks, try reading this post on squirrel neuroses on one of my very favorite blogs called Naturespeak.  One of the many, many benefits of becoming a blogger is discovering other people's blogs, and y'all have impressed the socks off me with your tracking expertise.

I have an infinitely long way to go before I'm any good at identifying critters and reconstructing their behaviors.  But as I start looking more thoughtfully at tracks in the snow I am starting to think of them almost as rather ghostly impressions an animal's spirit has left behind.  As one begins to unravel the complex patterns in the snow, one can almost sense the passage of time and see the animals walking, digging, pausing, jumping, flying and marking as they passed by.

When else can one so accurately reconstruct an animal's movements, other than when there's snow on the ground?  Unless, I suppose, one is a dog.  I strongly suspect my hounds smell the ghostly scent impressions left behind the way I see the snow prints, only they can do it year round.  If they could talk, they could probably tell me what type of animal it was, what it had for breakfast, when it last mated and how anxious it was when it walked by, among a lot of other things.

My inferior senses leave me to laboriously puzzle out the snow prints instead.

On Saturday at Baltimore Woods I didn't identify any remarkable prints beyond the ones one might usually expect to find - mostly a whole lot of deer and squirrel.  But they, too, do interesting things.  Both had been engaging in a great deal of digging.  Presumably the squirrels were looking for buried treasure they (or their neighbors) had saved up for the winter.

There were tons of these little divots, and while you can't see them in this photo, they were generally surrounded by squirrel prints.

The deer, on the other hand, were rummaging for farm field remnants.  At first glance I noticed the farm field was criss-crossed with deer prints.

At second glance I noticed some odd disturbances in the snow in the middle of some of the trails.

Upon closer inspection I found the field had had corn in it in the fall, and the deer sure knew where to find the corn-cobs that had been missed by the harvesters.

The snow also helps me out by pointing out things I would ordinarily miss, such as this debris:

which made me look up to spot the source:

Suddenly I could envision all sorts of woodpeckers who might have hopped up and down and hammered on that tree.  I have always wondered how on earth they can do that without getting wicked headaches.

In winter, even the plants leave behind ghostly remnants of their former glorious selves, such as this wild cucumber pod.  How cool is this weird spiky thing?  It reminds me of a blowfish:

One can picture the growth of these pods from tiny little nubs to spiky green pods tossed by the breeze. Eventually these skeletal pods will fade away and become part of the soil again, where the new green shoots will emerge in the spring.

So here's to the neverending mystery of the great outdoors, and to joy of discovering just how fun and mysterious the forensic reconstruction of a critter's passage can be.

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Scrrrunching through the woods

This past weekend was nearly as crammed full of obligations as the prior weekend (and next weekend isn't looking any better).  However, I made it a priority to get outside for a brief snowshoeing trip on Saturday by telling myself it was officially on my "must do" list so I'd have something to blog about.

That, my friends, is one of the reasons I like keeping this blog.  It helps me prioritize getting outside even when it seems impossible.  My best friend teases me that I can justify just about anything if I work at it. She's so right!

My husband (God bless the man!) decided he'd rather stay home and put away the Christmas tree and clean the house than frolic in the great outdoors, so I left him in charge of the fur and took advantage of the rare opportunity to play somewhere that dogs are not allowed.  Usually if we're heading outdoors the hounds have to come too because a) I feel too guilty leaving them inside when I'm out having fun, and b) I don't feel like torturing myself unnecessarily by allowing them to build up too much pent up energy.

One of my very favorite places to play in the woods is a place called Baltimore Woods.  Dogs aren't allowed there, so I don't get there very often anymore despite that it's quite close to home.  I miss it.  I have been going to Baltimore Woods in all seasons since I was a kid and love it.  It's never too crowded, is a nice mix of wood and field and stream and pond, makes for good birding and wildlife spotting, and is by far the best place I know of to look for spring wildflowers.  They have wonderful nature education programming, too.

The terrain at Baltimore Woods is pretty rugged as it's centered around a deep gorge on lots of cool glacial geology.  Skiing isn't allowed there - for a darn good reason.  I have been cross-country skiing since I was 2, and while I'm no ski racer or remarkable talent on them, I am extremely comfortable on skis.  But you couldn't pay me any amount of money to try to cross country ski down this:

If you managed to avoid the trees in the first few big sweeping turns, you wouldn't likely manage to avoid them in the much steeper switchbacks at the bottom, and if you did manage to avoid the trees, you'd end up (bump bump bump kersplunk!) in a frigid stream at the bottom.

No thanks.  There were two foolhardy individuals (male, roughly 20) putting on skis just as I was leaving.  I hope no ambulances were involved.  It pays to read the rules - sometimes they exist for good reason.

Anyway, I have been hoping since I bought my snowshoes that Baltimore Woods would be steep enough for me to use the MSR's "Televator Heel Lifter" feature.  It turns out that it's mighty hard to take pictures of one's own heels - here's the best I could manage:

See that lighter gray tab under my tan boot heel?  It's on a black metal bar.  That's the Televator doohickie, which is basically just a bar that lifts up under the heel. Instead of resting on the bottom of the snowshoe, the heel rests on the elevated bar so that your foot is much more level while climbing steep terrain.  It reduces calf strain. Worked like a charm coming back up that gorge! Then I had a heck of a time getting them back down. Not only is the angle wrong for photography of one's own heel, but it's also wrong for grabbing a tab and pulling backward and down while wearing the snowshoes.  Ah well.  Fun toy anyway.

Technically it wasn't snowy enough to need snowshoes on Saturday - curse this above-32 spell.  I could have walked quite comfortably without them most of the way.  But they're new, provide good traction, and my boots don't have a cool Televator feature that I was dying to try out.  So I snowshoed.  The disadvantage was that they're noisy as heck on the kind of heavy damp icy snow we presently have.  The SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH SCRRRUNCH of my footfalls certainly scared off any wildlife I might otherwise have crept up on.

There are only about 6 miles of trails at Baltimore Woods, and I usually take the longest perimeter trail just to get some distance in.  I think perhaps the many different habitats the trail passes through are part of why I like Baltimore Woods so much.  I made my way down to the bottom of the gorge, then worked my way back up on the other side through deciduous woods, and along the edge of some open fields.  It passes through a long-abandoned sand pit that makes for good bird watching, although only chickadees serenaded me there on Saturday:

And then it winds along the edge of some farm fields.

I distinctly recall once seeing three baby raccoons hiding up a tree on the edge of the farm field.  It was my husband's first trip there perhaps 5 years ago, and it predated my camera-toting days.  But we played peek-a-boo with those fuzzy baby raccoons for a good 10 minutes because they were so irresistibly cute, and they firmly believed that if they couldn't see us, we couldn't see them.  I think of them every time I pass through here - I even remember the exact tree they were in.

Eventually the trail winds its way back through the woods and up and down the sides of the gorges again, and past a pond.  The pond is great for duck/heron/turtle/frog watching in warmer seasons.

Then I scrrrunched along through more woods, across a stream, and back on up the really steep side of the gorge with my Televators in action and back to the car.  It wasn't a long walk but those hills make for good exercise.  I certainly felt infinitely better for a few hours in the delicious sunshine and fresh air.

I need to make a point of getting to Baltimore Woods more often.  Come spring, I will make a point of coming back so I can post a whole bunch of wildflower pictures.  What a long way off that seems!

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Really Big Toys

I appreciated this article by Sean Kirst in the Post-Standard yesterday, about how Syracuse is the snowiest big city in the U.S. and we should embrace that status more fully.

Admittedly I feel a twinge when I contemplate the snowiest big city status because the "population of 100,000" threshold is fairly arbitrary, and places like Fulton and Lowville always have Syracuse beat when it comes to snowfall.  I understand that Lowville has some massive rotary snow plows that they pull out when there's too much snow for regular plows.  I haven't seen them myself, but in searching the Internet for some photos or footage, I encountered quite the cache of riveting snow removal footage.

Check out this sucker.  It's essentially what would result from a regular big old snow plow mating with a snow blower, and then the offspring taking steroids.  A lot of them.  Or check out this one (I love the punch line on that video, when they pan over to a clear view of the oops!, and the evil laughter in the background).

By far my favorites among the Wicked Cool Snow Moving Equipment, though, relate to trains.  Try this awe inspiring footage of a plowing train.  I found myself leaning forward as I watched the engine bog down, as if I could somehow help it break through.  Or how about this little engine that could?  How on Earth do they get trains out of situations like that, or like this?  Apparently with a little assistance.

Okay.  Eh hem.  Betcha didn't know I'm part redneck at heart.  Big Snow Plows.  Heh heh heh.  Cooool.

Back to that article, though - I completely agree that we ought to embrace our crazy snowfall 'round these parts.  We cope with the snow remarkably well on a technical level, but couldn't we play it up a bit more? Make it a tourist attraction and get more people outside playing in it, rather than just enduring it?  Instead of just hosting international bass fishing tournaments on Onondaga Lake, how about hosting a snowplowing competition?  I, for one, would go to it.

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