Ever Seen a Subaru with a Mohawk?

That's right. For a minute, we had a punk rocker car. The storm over the weekend gave us a little over a foot of snow, and in clearing the car off, it had an unusual haircut for a minute.
We cleared the first 4 or 5 inches off on Saturday, but on Sunday morning, this was back on top. The weather station up at the road shed on Cedar Mountain where we keep the snow cat is reporting 109 inches of snow on the ground! That's about as tall as 3 Hakan's. I may be ready for spring. Dad

Happy Valentine’s Day…

To ALL of My Sweethearts! You make my heart happy!!

And a Happy Valentine’s Day especially to my sweetheart of more than 30 years!

To love and be loved is everything—I am so blessed!
XOXOXO

Mom

"I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK..."

Greetings to one and all! Things seem to have slowed down a bit here on the family blog, so I thought I’d try and get things going again, if I can.
Things have been pretty quiet around here since we saw some of you at Christmas. We got a big storm just before Christmas that put down 5 1/2 inches of rain here at the park, but we got no snow out of it. There was another storm just after New Years that did give us about 8 inches of snow, but most of that is gone now. But up on Cedar Mountain, the big storm before Christmas turned into a disaster. They got about 5 feet of snow up there and more with the second storm. The first storm was so heavy and wet, it coated the trees with snow and ice and bent and broke a lot of them, especially around the Duck Creek area. Some of them were just columns of snow and ice.


Anyway, what that storm did to our snowmobile trails has to be seen to be believed! I have spent about 130 hours since then up on the mountain cutting and moving trees out of the trail system. Most of them fell during the big storm, so they are half buried in the trail. So we get to pull up to them in the snowcat, dig down to see what we’re dealing with, use the chainsaw to cut them in pieces, hook a chain or strap to them, pull them out with the ‘cat, and then either bulldoze them off the trail or move them off by hand.

Yes, this is our trail, with about 8 trees down in 30 feet of trail!

Some of the aspens didn’t break, but got folded over and have their tops buried in the middle of the trail, so we still have to cut them at the base, hook up the strap and pull the top out with the cat. All this while wading around in thigh deep snow. With all the lumberjack work, we’ve made a point of having two of us along on these trips, since wading through deep snow by yourself with a chainsaw in hand is usually considered a bad idea.

Sometimes it looks like a bomb has gone off. You just stand there and stare at it and it's still hard to believe.

Needless to say, it’s been wearing this old man right out. Add the fact that it takes me 4 – 5 hours in travel time just to get to the part of the trail where we are working, and it makes for some pretty long days – last Thursday was a 15 hour shift. But that is what I’ve been spending most of my time on since the new year started. We are getting close to getting the trees cleared and we should be able to get back to a normal grooming schedule soon – if it doesn’t pound us again before we are able to get them all cleared.

I try and remember to enjoy the nice scenery while I'm up there, though. This was taken at the top of the ski run at Brian Head.

Well, that's about it for me, I guess. I would like to encourage all of you to do a post now and again and keep us up to date on what's going on with all of you. I'm wondering if Facebook has kind of taken over our time and we aren't blogging as much as before. But for those of us who are "Faceless" (mainly me, I think), this blog is important in keeping up with everyone. So let us know what's new with you - it means a lot. Bye for now! Dad