tamarack

Noisy, kind of like sleet coming thru hardwood twigs.

Most have had a partial harvest, done mainly to create glades. In dense spruce-fir it's hard to travel on foot in summer, much less on skis or snowboards in winter. The open hardwoods probably were full of 1-2" diameter saplings too. Many stands in Maine look very little like the VT glade pics.

Had studs om my '69 Nova - NNJ often has more ice than snow on roads and that's where studs make a difference. Only other vehicle we've had with studs was our '83 Cavalier. The front-wheel drive 5-speed got 32-33 mpg and aggressive-tread snows, and was easily the best 2WD critter I've ever driven. Once we had to stop on Rt 11 on Soldier Pond hill, 10 miles south of Fort Kent and 10-12% uphill, because a pickup was losing it in the 2-3" new snow. He got it together and we had no problem starting back up. 6" snow on the half mile/250' climb to home in the back settlement nor in 6" April mud that caught bigger (15" wheels to our 13s) cars and full size 2WD pickups. Unfortunately the unibody "frame" rusted out after 10 years and 147k miles while the car still offered smooth 30+ mpg - engine never missed a beat.

Vermont upslope fluff may be unmatched, but Sugarloaf has about 1000 acres of tree skiing east of the groomed trails on Burnt Mt and Brackett Basin. No grooming there but it's patrolled. About half looks like it's lift serviced, and further east it's skins or sno-cat. (MY knees rule out any skiing but the maps look interesting.)

Will surely help, but dry snow atop cold ice is as close to a frictionless surface of anything outside of a physics lab. Studs might help. Our Subarus have never been close to getting stuck in the driveway but the little Rangers/Mazda have occasionally required lots of wood ashes - small short grade but zero run-up. If I can get up the driveway I'll make it over Mile Hill. (Climbs 300' in that mile, steepest near the top, sharp turn at the bottom to discourage making a run.)

AVG DAILY SNOWFALL (Month avg/days) OCT .02 NOV .16 DEC .61 JAN .63 FEB .81 MAR .56 APR .18 MAY .01 Not that this means anything this year.

Despite snow reports from all over and echoes overhead many times, I've managed to escape any flakes since Monday morning.

Pretty much like every GFS run since last Saturday's event, though sometimes that spot of leprosy is a bit farther north.

Odd that they left the heart. A little buck fawn was killed less than 50 yards from our house in mid March 2009. When I found it, the hammies were torn up from where the coyote(s) brought it down and the only things missing were heart, lungs and liver. Two days later bones and hide were scattered over half an acre - wish I'd cracked a femur when I first saw the critter to see how badly the deer had been starving. Marrow color tells the story - cream: healthy; pink: beginning to starve; red: critically starving; red/watery: zombie.

Agreed. Two of my biggest snowfalls this season were somewhat salvaged cutters - messy but lots better than the mega-Grinch deluge. The 3rd, Jan 2, was a cutter on models up until 2-3 days prior.

Kind of like "Thirty-Eight, The Hurricane that Transformed New England"?

Something happened for NNE (Maine at least) in early Feb. Prior to the big dump on 2/10-11 we'd not had even a 4" event here. Then the period Fe. 10-Mar. 12 brought 61". Tough winter. Here we are at/near climo's lowest temps of the season and some haven't seen even one storm over 6". Second half has got to be better than the first, right? Revised for our area.

The day after we moved from in-town Fort Kent to the back settlement, our neighbor's dog (large white German shepherd) was playing with an adult coyote on the slope facing our yard. Farmers in the area piled stones in the middle of fields rather than in walls, and the 2 canids were playing at one, remaining 180° from each other but with tails wagging. When Princess headed home the coyote followed halfway to the house. Lots of wildlife there - coyotes howling nearby or staring at our house (always when I was away, wife was not amused), the "jackpot" raspberry patch across the road had its best picking after the bears had broken trails thru the canes.

The 3 big midwinter storms of 78 were mostly meh in northern Maine. Fort Kent got 4" from Jan. 20-21, a rainy slushy mess from the OV bomb, then 2" from the fringes of Feb. 6-7. That was followed by 5 weeks of cold nothingness - Feb 8 thru Mar 13 had 0.26" precip. After the 13" of 18:1 fluff on Jan. 18, that winter had no more warning criteria events left.

True even when we lived in NNJ. Of the 7 big (18-24"+) storms 3/56 thru 2/61, only the 3/58 dump was paste and none had p-type issues. 2/61 got into the upper 20s but the other five had temps 10-25. Same for big storms in 64 and 67, and even with the near-30 peak during 2/69's Mayor Lindsey storm the event was all powdery. Biggest paste job we've had in Maine was 3/22-23/2001 with 16" of fir-top breaking snow while Eustis had 34".

That month is the most recent where our area got dumped on (37" in Farmington) while points south were a tiny bit too warm (PWM 3.7").

Pretty thin outside of the mountains - even the far north is way below average though far better than around here. Not sure the club trail thru our woodlot is open yet, only a handful of sled passes down our road to access it, and at the corner of our gravel road and (paved) Industry Road is a place that works on snowmobiles. Our 9" "pack" isn't as tall as some of the rocks on that trail.

Not far away, Hooker (1,800' elev) averages about 120" thru Jan 20.

No flakes here since Monday AM. Being at 390' some 30-40 miles SE from 3-4k peaks kinda limits (eliminates) upslope. We live on synoptics.

IDK - we're 9.2° AN so far and our warmest January (2006) was 7.9° AN. This despite never getting up to 40. CAR is running +13, looks torchy to me. Today will make 29 AN days in the past 30, and only the few clear calm nighttime hours this month on the 12th allowed radiation sufficient to make that day -1.

Ever try skinning the non-salmonid freshwater fish? Makes all the difference, IMO. Not many pickerel up here as big as the one in your pic but the pike are bigger and make an outstanding fish stew.

My dad made 4 topwater traps about 1960 from a diagram in a sporting mag - more skimming required but can set it for sensitive or heavy-duty takes, never wind-sets (big issue with 1960 underwater traps) and never snubs a fish when being picked up to access the reel, also visible from 1/4 mile away, far longer than I'm now interested in running. He made 4 more in 1986 when my daughter got interested in ice fishing. Used a spud (ice chisel) for 5-6 years, great until the ice gets thicker than 10-12" then a real chore. The Snabb hand auger dad bought about 1961 is good to 30"+ (requires kneeling past 25) and is the only efficient spoon auger I ever saw, though it's also the only one I've seen in the past 50+ years; the corkscrew design took over the market.

NNE plow operators tend to clear snow for the next storm, not just the current one. That's probably why the RI fellow was so disappointed 4 years ago. Piles in Pawtucket after 15" looked just as big as western Maine mountain roadsides after 50" in 9 days atop a 30"+ pack.

12z GFS shows zero qpf here thru 300, after which the cold is gone. (Needs a barf emogi.)

Running +9° here for January, +6 for max and +12 for min.