February 2022 – Snow Month – Patricia McLellan's Blog

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.

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!

February 2022 – Snow Month

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