Rather often during mid-March we have the first plus-degrees, certain parts around the lake where the sun has long hours of power get slowly green, where water is moving the ice is getting thinner and makes place for the first waterbirds arriving from south. Not this winter... A very short period of plusdegrees was indeed announced by the meteorologists, but it lasted really only for a couple of hours. And then came the big weather-change! After almost 2 weeks pure sunshine and blue sky, last Tuesday arrived some first clouds and they broght us snow, snow and mre snow... it didn't want to stop and now we feel like in deep winter here. Some 40 cm of fresh Powder came down - on top of the snowcover of this winter, which is already thicker than usual. Our 3 scooters refused to work all on the same morning, means a preparing of trails by machines was impossible. Our reliable dogs took over this job and were fighting their way through the deep snow. Not an easy job, but they did great and piece by piece our trail-system got open again, while we were adjusting the tours to the possibilities of trails we had. As it did not stop to snow and strong winds came up as well, next morning all trails were gone again by either fresh powder or massive wind-blowings. By now our Scooter Viking is back at work and it stopped snowing, also the srong winds stopped. A good reason to look foreward to another great week in deep winter-wonderland in late winter!
Caused by the heavy winds during the last days, we of course suffered again from some power-cuts. Still remembering our 48h-period without electricity just after Christmas, our water-expert Dennis wa immediately on the lake to get water from there for cooking, feeding, sauna etc. Luckily we had this time only rather short power-breaks and are back on normal water again.
Our giant babies, the Taivas-Pups, are all ready and wait unpatiently for their first run. Their tension is rising everythime they see other dogs starting out, but we well not put them in harness before the end of March. Although being really huge and powerful, as seen in the pictures of Marco and Levi, they have only a bit over 9 months of age.
Days are getting longer; we are at 12 hours sunlight now, from 6h00 - 18h00. The local people are now more often seen out in nature, either on skis or on scooters. Icefishing is soon getting very popular as well. And whoever from our team has time and motivation, is also testing out those funny narrow skis and doing first steps of crosscountry-skiing :-)
Fact: according to calender, spring is almost here, but we still have perfect deep beautiful winter!