Category: Uncategorized

Its been an eventful week to say the least. As I mentioned in the last entry, Nora and I traveled to Rochester MN so that I could get my pacemaker and one of the leads from it, replaced. I had several tests done Monday and Tuesday, with the replacement surgery happening at 10 am Wednesday. Once again, I proved to be a handful for the good folks at the Mayo Clinic, but they came through in shining colors as they have always done in the past. I have said it before and I will say it again, that facility and its staff are just amazing. I have yet to have a bad experience there and have NEVER had a nurse that was not over the top friendly and did their job extremely well. The daytime nurse I had was one I have had in the past! I guess that says something about how many times I have been in that joint!

We got home late Thursday, having to drive through some fairly heft snow squalls from around Hayward through Ironwood and Bergland and then things lightened up for the final hour of the trip. I felt bad because one of my restrictions from the surgery was no driving for 10 days, which meant that Nora had to drive the entire way, on top of stressing out about me in surgery the day before. She came through like a champ and although she gave me some grief for all the money I spent on a “radar/laser” detector, it did save us at least 3 times, or maybe more properly put, allowed us to travel a bit faster than we normally would!

The same day I had my surgery, my mom also passed away. It may sound cliché, but it really was more of a blessing that it happened. She was 87, so had lived a very long and full life. She had not been in the best of health since having a stroke around 2 years ago. In fact, several setbacks had sent her to the hospital and then several weeks of rehab since her stroke.

Nora, Grace, all of the rest of my immediate family (except for a Niece in FL) were able to be with her in the days before she got sick this go around. In fact, the same morning that Nora, Grace and I headed home from being with her, she woke up and had pains in her abdomen and had to be taken to the hospital. Initially, they though she had a blockage in her intestines, but it turned out to be in her stomach. Because of her age and existing conditions, they were very hesitant to do surgery, for fear she would not survive. So for over a week, they tried several different treatments, but none of them were working. On the 4th, she developed severe pain in her abdomen and requested to have the surgery done. She did survive the surgery, even to the point where they were able to remove the ventilator and she could communicate a bit Tuesday, but then went down hill Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning, the doctors said that she would not make it. She passed very comfortably and peacefully at around 4:30 Wednesday afternoon.

She will for sure be missed by all who knew her. She was an incredibly strong woman in many ways. Not just physically and mentally to go through all the health issues she had in her final years, but strong willed. If there was anyone who was going to make something happen, it was her. She was also not afraid to standup for what she believed in and would NOT back down from a fight to hold her ground. Some of my most vivid memories of her while I was growing up was of her going face to face with someone who had wronged her or one of her children. A few times I would even start to feel sorry for the other person. She would not yell or use threatening language, just would stand there like a rock and not give an inch until the situation was resolved to her liking.

Of course that same strength was applied to raising her children and it did not take all of us long to realize you did not try and argue or even negotiate with her! She did mellow out as she aged, even to the point where us children were able to tell her what to do, although I have to admit, I never grew comfortable with that privilege and did not exercise it much! 

I am at peace with her passing, knowing that she is with my dad and brothers, as well as the rest of the family members and friends who have passed. As is the case when anyone we love passes, she took a part of me that I will never get back, but has also left me with all the memories of her love for me.

For those of you reading this and are wondering about a service, the family has decided to wait until the first half of summer to hold a memorial for her. My brother lives up here in the Keweenaw and my sister in Oklahoma. Her grandchildren live in Washington state and Florida, so rather than create a chaotic situation by having a service in the days after her passing, we are going to wait until all the children are on summer break and allow us to comfortably plan her service.

As far as events in the Keweenaw go, winter just does not want to leave us for good yet. As mentioned, we drove through snow showers and snow squalls on the way home and it was snowing when we arrived home in Jake. Friday we had off and on snow showers and then by late afternoon into the evening, the snow intensified and we awoke to a fresh 6″ by Saturday morning. We did warm to 42 under a fairly strong April sun during the day and all of the snow that had fallen Friday night melted, plus some. We are already at 44 and it is only 11:15. There are some clouds today, but for sure more snow will melt. The forecast does not hold much more snow for us and temps in many of the days ahead look to reach into the upper 40’s and even some low 50’s, so perhaps spring is truly here in earnest. I doubt that we are done with seeing flake fall and perhaps even some minor accumulations, but we really have reached the time of the year when the weather is more spring like than winter.

I know I am ready for spring, as are about 99% of the locals. I am also ready for a quiet week and for my heart to start feeling the effects of its new hardware!

Good Night From the Keweenaw..
–JD

Just a quick note to let you all know I have not run off to the Caribbean…yet. We are currently in Rochester MN at an undisclosed location. I am here to get my pacemaker and at least one of the leads for it replaced. Back in January of this year, my pacer reached the end of it’s productive life. When this happens, it still has around 90 days left before it goes caput for good.

Another thing I just learned a few days ago is that as it nears it’s final end, it goes into a kind of “preservation mode”, which means it is still working, but not to the full ability that it normally does. I was actually grateful to hear that, because for the past month or 2, I have really started to feel my physical stamina go downhill. 

It has gotten to the point where, on bad days, I cannot even walk 100 feet on level ground without having to stop and catch my breath. So it was wonderful news to know that the pacemaker going into preservation mode and one of my leads being shot is the reason for my decline in health and not that my poor heart was in decline.

I have some tests to do tomorrow and Tuesday and then Wednesday they will be doing the surgery. The surgery is really a cakewalk when it comes to affairs of the heart. I have obviously already been through the insertion of the unit, but also back around 5 years ago, I had that first unit replaced because its battery was getting low.

I doubt it will be outpatient like the first replacement was, but who knows, it just might be. The Dr I had a consult with over the phone last Friday said that we would be able to leave Rochester and head home as long as there were no “surprises”. So this is almost a mini-getaway for us, rather than some big worrisome surgery.

Hope you all are surviving the first week of no-snowmobiling season. Our weeks weather was kind of messy, with some mixed precip on Monday and again on Friday. Seems like old Ma Nature is in no hurry to commence with the meltdown in any real fashion. I suppose the slow-crawl speed is good for chipping away at the large amount of snow still on the ground, preventing flooding, but now that snowmobile season is over, the vast majority of the folks in the Keweenaw are ready to see some green.

I will close for this go-around, have a great week ahead and I will talk to you all next Sunday!

Good Night From the Keweenaw..
–JD

Spring has sprung in the Keweenaw. Now, before all of you start envisioning green grass and beautiful flowers, we are in “early spring”. That means we have had several days in a row with above freezing temps. The snows are melting, but we still have more to melt than has melted so far. The sun has been out much more frequently and that has lifted everyone’s mood.

All the roads are bare, even the side roads. Potholes are becoming commonplace and there has even been a few reports of robins in yards. The appearance of robins is a bit early for us, they are going to be hurting for food for a few weeks, as they are not known for chowing down at feeders. They prefer worms and insects. I suppose though, if one is hungry enough, one will eat just about anything!

The snows have also been disappearing off of the roofs up here. Just a few weeks ago, it was due to being shoveled off, but that stopped about a week ago in most cases. For the last week, it has been due mainly to the forces acted upon it via mother nature. For those of us with metal roofs, that means a steady dripping of melted snow off the eaves, combined with a slow creeping of the main body of snow towards the eaves. In our case, is also has meant the creeping of the main snow body beyond the eave, leaving it suspended in mid air. That last shot was taken yesterday and we refrained from using the door to the front porch.

Yesterday around midday, we took a little trip to see if we could get to the beach at White City and when we got back, the snow hanging had broken off. This morning, I took this picture of how things looked after the calving of the snow and ice shelf. About a week ago, we had a similar slide and end result (ice sticking straight up, forming a wall) on the back roof, only the ice was around 10″ thick. This also happened right where the back door to the yard is located and caused the dogs to have to be a little creative in getting around it. I plan to take the chainsaw to that chunk of ice and give them back an easy way to get from the house to the yard.

There also some patches of bare ground showing up. The only ones in our yard are from where I cleared snow all season to keep a path open to the shop and the other in the backyard to allow the dogs to get around in the backyard. In the natural category. I have seen a few spots of bare ground showing in areas where the wind was able to scour the snow away. No pictures of that though.

On the other side of the coin is where the snow is still very deep. In the manmade category, there are piles of snow in Calumet that are 20 feet tall still. The villages of Calumet and Laurium have done all of the side roads with the snowgo, and those roads are canyons carved out of snow that is 6-10 feet deep. They still have a lot of snow to melt in the high country! On the naturally made side of things, there are drifts of snow and the grand daddy of them all is the Laurium Glacier. I have been watching it grow all winter long and because this winter has had an abundant amount of snow and a high number of days with very strong winds, I think the Laurium Glacier is as large as I have ever seen. It’s hard to judge from that picture, but I would estimate it to be 20-25 feet deep. I will be doing the meltdown contest for the Laurium Glacier this year and it will be starting tomorrow at 10 am eastern time on the discussion board in the miscellaneous section.

The final early spring activity I can share with you is something that happens every year at this time. It has to do with the fact that the county puts weight restrictions on some of the country roads up here. This is likely foreign to a lot of you. I know it was for me, coming from a rather urban setting. The reasoning is this: not all roads are built the same and I am not talking about 2 lane vs. 4 lane or limited access vs. open access. I am talking about what lies beneath the surface you are driving on. In some cases, very little is done. They will grade the land surface to make it flat, then will put down some kind of a fairly thin underlayment, like a layer of sand or crushed rock. Depending on how much goes into the time and materials beneath the roads surface, the road will be given a classification. The purpose of the classification primarily revolves around the amount and type of traffic that travel on it and thus how much time and material is used in the building of the road. The more the road gets used, the more time/material that goes into it. In the spring, the ground the road is built on becomes soft due to the melting of the ground and also the input of snowmelt into the ground. The lower classification roads do not have as much built into them to handle this softening and thus will have weight restrictions put on them in the spring to help keep the road from becoming damaged. Any road with weight restrictions gets posted at the entry points, so another term for the closing of roads to heavy vehicles is “posted”. 

So now that you know the whole process of road construction! I can share with you this picture and explain what is going on. Those logs are stacked there because the logging crew is cutting on a road that will be posted soon. They haul the logs out of the logging area and stage them in a place where they will be able to load them back up and haul them to the mill when they want to, not having to wait for the weight restrictions to come down. So there you have it, another free Northwoods living lesson!

Hope you all have a wonderful TWO weeks! I will not be writing next week. The family and I will be heading south to visit my mom. This week will also be the final week of snowfall forecasts and they will likely be done in the form of the graphics and Snow Church only.

Good Night From the Keweenaw..
–JD

 

There is an old bar (probably refurbished by now) on the west shoreline of Lake Delevan in southern WI. It was one of the establishments that I would visit from time to time, when I was not behind the oak creating libations for others at the west end of Geneva Lake, inside Chuck’s. I was not a “regular” there and it’s has been 30+ years since I stepped foot inside, but I can still remember the smell of stalk beer mixed with slowly decaying wood. The building itself was in need of some stabilization, or perhaps demolition. From the front door to the front of the bar, roughly a distance of 20-25 feet, the floor sloped down no less than 8″. I suppose the owner thought it was a clever and continent way to encourage customers to step up to the bar and spend some money.

It is still standing and still functioning at a tavern. Back in my roudier days, it was what one might call a dive-bar. Most of the customers were the hard drinking type, that did not have far to weave and/or stumble to get home. Drinks were cheap and unless Choop was behind the bar, there really was not much of a reason for me to even drive by, let alone go in side. I have no idea what the atmosphere is like now, if they fixed the sloped floor and if the smell has changed, but this entry is not about the INBO, it’s about the in-between up here.

That in-between is of a different nature. It is the time of the year that separates two distinct seasons. The long, cold, snowy and magical winter of the Keweenaw with warm, sunny and magical summer of the Keweenaw. There are many places in the mid-latitudes where the difference in seasons is dramatic, but I would have to say that the difference that the Keweenaw experiences is about as dramatic as it gets. Not only are the differences so extreme, but they each are so beautiful! Many would complain about the severity of our winter, but long with the severity comes exquisite beauty. The ground and other objects are not just coated in snow, they are frosted in a layer of white that looks like a cake decorator who is infatuated with creme frosting had their way with things and did not stop until no more frosting could be applied before the whole thing collapsed. Who have seen a mailbox with three feet of snow delicately sitting on top of it? Who have seen a row of balsam trees with their branches so laden in snow they look like military senturys standing post in white overcoats? Who has driven down a side street with snowbanks piled so high, you can only see the upper floor of all of the houses? That is the magic of winter in the Keweeenaw.

The transformation to summer is not done quickly. Typically we get a tease of warmer temps in late February or early March that helps to generate smiles on the locals faces. The highly focused muscle patterns that are used to help keep the cold and wind from causing excessive pain on the exposed faces of the inhabitants disappear for a moment. People will stop and chat with others, letting the sun warm their faces while pleasantries are exchanged about what a beautiful day it is.

Those teases typically do not last longer than a day or two. Many times their warmth and relaxed environment is replaced by a large dumping of snow and invasion of arctic air. Perhaps a week later, the next tease is paying a visit and perhaps it’s departure is not punctuated by as severe a snow event and/or blast of bitterly cold air behind the snow.

Another thing that takes shape during the in-between is the gain in minutes where the sun is above the horizon becomes much more noticable. We are gaining a little more than 3 minutes a day in available sunshine, which will equate to around 25-30 minutes over a weeks time. That means, the sun spends nearly 2 hours more above the horizon than it did just a month ago. 

Not only are the minutes of sunlight increasing but so too are the strength of those rays. By early March, a sunny day with temps in the upper teens to low 20’s will see the snow on roadways melt off due to the roadways absorption of energy from the sun. The main highways clear first, but then will have wet areas where the snowmelt is running across them. The side roads melt slower. They have not been maintained as aggressively. Less scrapes with the plow trucks and little, if any, treatments to help melt the snow and ice on them. Depending on how often they get plowed and also what kind of roadway they are, they can become nearly or literally impassable during the spring “break-up”. Either the mat of packed down snow is so thick that when it melts to become more like slush, it is too deep to pass through, or in most cases, the roadway surface is not solid. Perhaps it is dirt, crushed rock or some kind of an amalgam, but as the snow melts and the water from it seeps into the ground, the road becomes a quagmire of ruts 6-12″ deep. This is when the county will close the road until it dries enough that they can send down a grader to flatten out and pack down the road and make it passable. The slow and sometimes reverse direction of our spring can see this road closing process happen many times.

Amongst the living creatures the in-between can be the toughest time of the year. They have already had to survive what would be the most severe winter ever for many spots across the country. The snow is typically deepest and most solid it has been all season, making it very difficult for them to dig down to find food. Sometimes there only hope is that the snow is deep and solid enough that they can reach branches they could not before and steal a brown and fibery meal. The deep we go into the break-up of winter, the more food that starts to become available. First it is some small shrubs that were buried by the first big snow of the season, then, eventually the grasses  begin to appear. The blades of grass are dead and may even be coated with some snow mold in spots, but a few days of sunshine can green up some of the grasses and provide a more desirable meal.

Green grass does not signal the end of winter as it does in many other places. The Keweenaw is usually good for a couple more snows after the greening of the grass. Even the early blooming plants like tulips, daffodil and trillium have seen their fair share of snow blankets put over them in the years I have lived here.

The in-between is generally bug free. At least from the biting kind. The bees, wasps and hornets will show their faces as the days grow warmer, but the real pests of the Keweenaw- the mosquitos, black flies, deer flies and horse flies are still weeks away. The latter two months away.

The in-between is also a time of great patience. Some are still hoping for one or two big snowstorms so they can get their final fix of powder play before putting the winter toys away. Sometimes their wishes are granted, other times not. However, the Keweenaw is one of those places where you have a greater chance of the big spring snowstorm to hit than others. On the other side of the coin, others are chomping at the bit to break out the summer toys. Motorcycles, boats, golf clubs, bicycles, fishing poles, ATVs, you name it. It is their wait that is usually long and wrought with setbacks. Early March in the Keweenaw is purely winter. Mid-March is where the teases will begin to appear. The end of March and early April sees the the sun strong enough and temps usually warm enough where the net change in the snow situation is a loss. By mid-April, the low snow areas are usually snow free, with the others to follow by the end of the month. However, there are standout years in which a solid snowpack will remain into May. Life in the Keweenaw is like a box of chocolates!

This past week was the early stages of the in-between for this season. No warm temps, some light snow, but nothing too meaningful. The main snows were Friday. A few snow showers in the morning and then the front came through and we had some decent snow falling for a few hours into the early overnight hours. I had to go to Houghton Friday afternoon and with the morning snow showers putting down a fresh 1/2″ or so, the west winds that kicked up to 35-45 mph made for some challenging driving conditions on Bootjack Road, especially in the open areas like the “Green Spot”. Once in town, the Lift Bridge would come and go into view with the varying snowfall intensity. Crossing the bridge and looking east towards downtown Houghton left us with a blank canvas.

A day earlier, all was calm and bright, but cold, with temps in the mid teens for highs. Pretty unusual for early March in the Keweenaw. That was the story for just about all the week. Cold temps for this time of the year. The sun tried to melt the snow, but could only succeed where the plows had scraped patches of pavement clear and that pavement was able to heat up. That was the look out onto the northern end of Keweenaw Bay. The ice just locked in the entire bay solid about a week or so ago. It will probably remain that way for another week or two before breaking up for the summer.

The slow melting going on has created a Hangfire off of our front porch. The back roof let loose a week or so ago and left 10″ thick ice on the ground. Where the back door is, the ice fell and stuck in the snow vertically, creating a 10″ thick and 4 foot wide ice wall that the dogs have to navigate when they go out into the backyard!

The lack of a thaw and deep snow even in yaring areas like Jacobsville have put a lot of stress on the deer herd. They are moving quite slowly through the woods or in their escape from the road. Last night Grace and I came home from having dinner and this poor one was already asleep at the end of the driveway. It did not even move as we pulled closer, parked and walked from the truck to the shop and from the shop to the house. I did pull a few apples from the fridge, as well as a couple of husks of romaine lettuce and tossed them right to the deer. It did not eat them or even get up for around 30 minutes. Then Nora noticed about 34 minutes later that it had moved and this morning the food was gone. So not sure if it ate things, or another critter, but I sure was worried we would find a dead deer laying there come morning, so I was happy it got up and left around 45 minutes after we came home.

Until next week.

Good Night From the Keweenaw..
–JD