Late Winter? Or is it Spring?

Greetings from Burley, the wet rat dog, and I. 😀 It's warmed enough for wading in the creeks to be fun. At least for him, I am not nearly so into wading in water that is approximately the temp of ice melt. He however adores it, and begs for more sticks to be thrown in the water pretty much endlessly. When he's all wet, you can see his neat coat color, dark shaded or wolf sable. Every hair that looks black most of the time, is actually

half brown. Only the tips are dark and when they get wet, you can see the brown bottom half showing through. Anyway, while there is still a lot of snow on most of the banks, he loves this! 

A big full moon came and went. I always like the photos just after full best though were you can see the craters and such.

Bands of elk are starting to move back out of the lowlands and move higher into the mountains as the snow starts to thin. This little group came by near my home as they moved higher. Overall, for the end of winter, they are looking pretty healthy.

Birds have continued to visit our clearing. Like the Red Crossbill above with it's funny twisted beak. And the Mountain Bluebirds have returned to the area with their brilliant blue color lighting up the landscape. 

Also Cassin's Finches above, and Osprey below. This one returned to it's nest, but I haven't seen it's partner yet so it was looking a bit lonely. Hopefully not for long. 

Above is what the snow pack in the yard looked like on April 4th. Then we finally got three days of sunshine and the temps rapidly soared to 50F, the warmest it's been since something like early October of last year. And those days, combined with spreading the winter's worth of wood stove ash on the surface like you can see below, melted a lot of snow. Anything dark on the surface really helps soak up heat from the sunlight, so I do this every year. And then the bits of ash and charcoal end up helping fertilize the garden, so it's been a good system for me. Seeing the rapid change was encouraging because once it starts to melt, then I get really ready to see the garden reappear. But if you live in an area like this, you know better than to trust a few warm sunny days...

And sure enough, right after those warm days it snowed some more, re-coating the half of the garden that had just reappeared out from under the snow. 

And the temps plummeted back to near zero. It's supposed to warm back up some next week, but for now, it's not feeling much like spring at all. 

But either way, Burley and I enjoy getting outside. Today we went on another long snowy, muddy, and cold walk. With occasional snow flurries. Burley found this nice little antler in the mud. A porcupine or something similar had already chewed off the one tine, but he was pretty proud of himself! 🙂We hope you are enjoying your days as well, possibly with a little more warm weather than us.