Here it comes...

Here comes winter.... at least, it looks like it. We'll see how much white stuff this system brings.

Yesterday:

Same view this afternoon:

Looking west:

Looking east:

and same view10 minutes later:

The storms seem to roll along the mountains here, and often don't dump any moisture out here in the middle of the flats where we live. I checked my archives for this time last year, and although we had a little more snow, the weather was similar- alternating between rain, snow, warm, cold, ice, mud.... very different from the January weather I remember as a kid, and even 30 years ago. (I grew up not too far from here, about an hour's drive.)

Ted and I hauled a load of wood on Saturday, we wanted to take advantage of the weather to get up the mountain road before the storms hit and make the roads impassable.

We got a nice load of tamarack (larch); my favorite wood as it's so easy to split. The branches are small and as the trees get taller they tend to not have many branches on the bottoms, therefore no big knots at the branch bases, so it makes for easy splitting. Burns hot, too. 

Ted is busy fabricating a hitch for the truck in the above photo; it's a 1976 Chev 3/4 ton 4X4 and it is going to be my horse hauling truck. He had to put a deck on it as the one that came with it was rusty and ugly.The new deck is quite high, so he has had to design and fabricate a complete system to drop the hitch low enough that the horse trailer will ride level.

Salvaging some steel off the old deck

He's a talented man, my Ted. I'm baking him a cake for when he comes in out of the cold. I'm not as talented as he is, but I can bake.