| Here we are, the morning of
November 1, 2003. Overnight temp was about -9 Celsius, it was -2
Celsius inside the cabin when we arrived about 7:00pm Halloween
night. It had snowed earlier in the week, probably Wednesday. We
lit a fire in the stove, had the temperature up to normal room temp
of 20 C. by bedtime, but the drinking water pitcher still had ice in
it. |
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| The lawn chairs are where we left
them in early September, the last time we were here: the temperatures
had been balmy all through September and October, though we had been
busy traveling and working on home projects and hadn't been up since. |
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| We had "winterize cabin" on
our list of things to do, one item of which was to empty the rain
barrels, now frozen solid in the arctic blast that moved in early in
the week. |
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| Yup, the downspouts froze as the
sun melted the snow on the roof. We elect to just leave them alone:
we'll be back this way in about three weeks, and it may warm up to
above freezing before then. It's much easier to dump out 1200 liters
of water than to wrestle more than a tonne of ice away from the cabin.
Part of the winterizing process is to hook up large drain hoses to
the downspouts to carry away the snowmelt, which means moving the
barrels and having the downspouts clear of ice. |
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| Just before dawn on November 2, it
started snowing. Here's a shot of the car as we were preparing to
head back home about 11:30 am. The road was snow-packed out to the
highway, but the highway was heavily sanded and well-traveled.
Further south, the snow was lighter, with little trace in the
Bitterroot Valley by the time we arrived home at 3:30 pm. |
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