February is a winter month where I live and it is expected that there will be snow on the ground all month long. Usually I also expect some sunny weather though the temperatures can be below freezing. This year, we have been getting new snow on a lot of days of February. This is the 25th of the month and so far I have been out moving snow on our driveway 13 of these days, including today. The snowfalls may not be that large each time, but they have been constant and are building up both on the lawn and along the roads.
Because of so much snow, I have not been out walking much, except to walk to a local dairy farm to pick up fresh milk in bottles. This I do once or twice a week depending on how much milk we have used. During today’s walk, I was thinking about the amount of snow that had built up during the month.
When I started my walk today, it was snowing, so some of the pictures are a bit dark. By the time I was on my home, the sun was playing peek-a-boo with the clouds and sometimes it was out and sometimes not.
We live on a side road so it is not as regularly cleared as I would have liked. However, yesterday a road scraper went by and scraped several layers of ice and snow off the road, leaving it piled up beside the road.
This road was scraped yesterday, though a little new snow came down in the night. On the left there is a guard rail hidden in the snow bank. I found the chunks of ice and snow on the right an imitation of the old-fashioned rock guards on many rural roads in Norway.The intersection between the road to Vangshylla and Utøyvegen. The road name signs are visible but snow and ice have been piled up around them.I also follow a farm road which has been cleared intermittently all winter. I wasn’t the first person walking up this hill today.Temperatures have been slightly above freezing the last couple of days, so snow has been sliding off roofs. With all this snow, the children at the dairy farm have obviously been out enjoying it. This week they even have a week off school.Walking along Utøyvegen, the guard rail is visible, though the snow is piled up to the top of it. The sun was trying to peek through the clouds.
As I was walking, I was thinking about the deer that live in our neighborhood. We have one deer who comes by at least once a day to eat the sunflower seed hulls lying on the ground under the bird feeder. I have also seen a group of three deer which I presume is a mother with two offspring from last year. The deer have long skinny legs so they do cross the fields of relatively deep snow.
Deer tracks in the snow. The deer cross the road in the same places all the time, winter and summer. It is just easier to see where in the winter.Deer tracks in the snow along the road.More deer tracks on the other side of the road.
I was walking home by now and thinking about the deer. The snow is getting quite deep for them and many of the tracks that I saw in the snow had been partly filled in by the new snow during the night. But suddenly, I saw our regular one.
The deer was on the road and she seemed to have caught either sight of me moving, or heard some sort of sound. I stopped walking to see what she would do. She seemed to have come from the left. She looked at me for a minute and then decided to dash off, into the field on the left.The deer was running, sort of, but the deep snow did not make it easy nor quick. I let her get away before going farther down the road.
It was good to get out and get some fresh air as well as some fresh milk. But I still had an hour’s work to do my share of cleaning snow off the driveway. Have a good day!
As the walks that I take at this time of year tend to follow the same few trails or roads, I look for different themes for taking my pictures as I walk. Today I noticed ice in different types of locations.
January 2022 was the month of storms in Norway, though we didn’t feel all of them where we live. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute summed up the month of January with very high levels of bad weather warnings (see the article in Norwegian here), about twice as many as a year ago. There was a storm somewhere in Norway on 26 of the 31 days in January, with 82 yellow warnings, 12 orange warnings (more serious) and 2 red, extreme warnings. Why were there so many storms in January in Norway? There was a high pressure area sitting over Great Britain, so they got the sunshine. The storms coming in off the Atlantic Ocean went around Great Britain and came to Norway.
I usually think of January as the month that it warms up a bit and the snow disappears. This year we got that, but we also got several storms that brought more snow, or heavy rain. The last week of January saw more snow. February tends to be, in my opinion, more stable weather, meaning that there are fewer storms and more sunnier weather, though it can be quite cold and very often a lot of ice.
Today the temperature was about +2 degrees Celsius and no wind when I was out walking. The sun shone intermittently, but the day felt bright. But the last few days has given us changeable weather, sometimes snow, sometimes rain, but always the temperature has been about zero degrees, so that the rain does not get rid of much of the snow. That means that we have had perfect conditions for creating ice, especially where one drives or where one walks.
Running water creates ice and this stream was no exception. This is the same stream that a few weeks ago was causing flooding on the field at the top. The stream is fed under the cultivated field through a large pipe. Here the stream tumbles down a ravine, causing ice to form along its path.In the woods, running water can also cause icicles to form. Here was a long series of icicles.As I got closer to the icicles, I noticed the rock formations as well. Here there were several layers of rock, with large spaces between them. Above there are farm fields. Some of the water seems to be flowing in the stream I had found a week ago, but most of the water just seemed to drip over the edge of the rocks. Note that there is a lot of moss on the rocks indicating that these rocks are wet all year long.The sun came out as I was writing my name in the tour book at the lean-to. I checked the map on my telephone and it told me that I was about 80 meters above sea level. I make sure I don’t go near the edge at this time of the year. I do not want to slide down a cliff face.A week ago, I had seen a large tree stump at the water’s edge at the beach. Was it still there, I wondered? So I walked down to the beach and sure enough, it was stranded near the high water level on the beach. Today the tide was much lower. We can have up to four meters difference between high tide and low tide.Back to ice and the conditions of the roads. This is a private gravel road that leads to five homes and many cabins. Icy! I was glad that I was wearing cleats under my shoes. I was also very careful where I walked. At the lowest point of this section of road, the stream goes under the road through a large pipe.Even the municipal road that leads to the quay at Vangshylla was very, very icy, though a bit of sand had been put down to allow cars better traction on the ice. Walking along the edge of the road, it was very icy. I was glad to be walking uphill, not downhill.As I walked up the road, I again saw icicles forming where water drains off the cliff and freezes as it falls.The yellow fence at the top of the cliff shows our property. Here, too, ice forms as water is draining away and then freezing.
As it was several days since I had been out for a walk, I dawdled a bit, watching where I was walking and was out for about an hour and a half. It was good to get fresh air and let my eyes focus on things far away, and not just look at a computer screen or my knitting.
