Windy day and night

Gusty winds have been blowing much of today and are expected to continue tonight. I wonder how many trees I'll find downed after tonight...

Chopped up more trees

Seems like the wind storm of last Friday knocked down more than the power poles. I spend this morning cutting up five felled trees. Yeesh, these dead ash are ANNOYING!

On the plus side, the wind wasn't too bad, and the weather not too (I can't believe I'm writing this) hot. (It really has been one odd "winter" in the forest.)

Power restored

Power was restored at about 5:30pm on Monday afternoon/evening.

Power outage

Returning back to Saginaw Forest after a week in Arizona, I found no electricity. Turns out that the winds from (most likely) Friday felled a tree, which then pulled down the power line.


This morning, DTE came out to fix the problem, but I think that it might be a little bit too much for them to handle in one day, since they didn't yet have any poles on site. I guess that I'll have clean out the fridge and buy new food soon. Ah, well... it needed cleaning out anyway.

Ice gone from lake

I don't know if this is the earliest time when Third Sister Lake, but there is no more ice on the lake. Not even a thin layer of it.

True, it never really set up at all this "winter", but it's amazing at how quickly it went away.

Volunteer Day coming up (tentatively April 1)

I have been thinking about having another volunteer day for doing larger-scale maintenance projects that I cannot do alone. These would be things like removing invasive plants from a section of the property, doing some basic trail maintenance (such as raking away years of accumulated leaves), or picking up some trash from along Liberty Road.

Right now, even though the winter has been effectively non-existent this year, I am thinking that it would be a good thing to wait until the start of April; perhaps even April 1 (no joke!). There will be other opportunities for people to volunteer during this summer, but right now, I think that a tentative April 1st work day ought to be penned into my calendar.

Since the property doesn't have too many tools - only enough for me, after all - volunteers would have to bring their own work gloves and tools. (Things like loppers, pruning shears, and hand saws ought to do the trick for most of that I am thinking about tackling.)

I still have to get final approval from the University for having a volunteer day, but I don't imagine that it will be a serious problem (and there might even be some funding available for refreshments).

I don't know how much of  a draw there will be from the student body, but I am also planning an early-May volunteer day so that students who are still in town will have fewer reasons not to come out on a weekend to help maintain a property.

Ice continuing to recede from Third Sister Lake

The amount of icecover on the lake is diminishing steadily now. Last week, it was a thin skein across most of the lake, extending all the way to the southern shore. Today, even with the snow from yesterday and this morning, the amount of ice cover - and thickness of the remaining ice - has seriously diminished.

I think that this is the year that winter didn't really come; it just "hung around" for a few days, preferring - apparently - to take a trip to the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas.