Winter blahs

On a hillside steep enough it would take reaching from tree to tree to climb, a moose stands nibbling at twigs, very visible backed by what snow the wind and rain left behind. This is the same hillside where a year ago in the dark, a moose seemed to drop out of the sky into the headlights after it careened down the slope.

That wind and rain left very little snow except in the shadows. Some people in Alaska last week experienced a 100-degree temperature change. Minus 50 at Christmas to plus 50 at New Year’s. Much more than a person should have to bear. Here it went from 20 below to 45 above in the same time frame and it looks like that brown dead period in the fall or the days before Green Day in the spring.

The avalanche danger was so high the field testers who check that sort of thing didn’t dare go because the warming made the snow pack dangerously unstable.

Life in limbo caught between seasons except we are supposed to be in the middle of winter. But the days supposedly are getting brighter though we haven’t seen the sun in a while.