By Joe Crain
It was an interesting month of weather here in the forest lands of northeastern Wisconsin. The colder than average trend we had been passing through continued with the first half of the month descending into January like temperatures. Next we had a sudden reversal in the colder than normal trend that put us into spring like temperatures. And finally the month wrapped up with a week of near normal temperatures that brought us two big snow storms that made it seem more like the month of Christmas rather than that of Thanksgiving.
Snow – I mean leaf blowing!
The taste of January we received started on November 5th when our already 10-degree-below-average temperature trend turned into a 10 day stretch of 20-to-30 degrees below average! So instead of waking to the expected upper 20s or lower 30s, we were starting our days in the lower teens and single digits! The highs during these ten days were even harder to take with the mercury never rising out of the mid-teens. On the twelfth of the month the temps hit the lowest and most January like when we experienced a morning low of -1 degrees and a day’s high of 18 degrees. This burst of January was almost enough to give us one of the earliest ice overs of the lake ever recorded, which would have really been something considering that the lake had no ice at all at the start of the month and was ¾ covered by that cold morning of the twelfth. It was so close that I actually found myself cheering on the cold snap that was making our annual week of wood splitting a rather uncomfortable test of our ability to tolerate cold! Unfortunately the extremely cold nights were also joined by a steady breeze that kept the main body of the lake out from camps waterfront from freezing over completely, and kept this year’s ice over from being a record.
Strangely our temperatures took a huge swing to above average territory for the first time in about 3 months on the 16th when we suddenly found ourselves in a stretch of 40+ degree weather. The sun which we hadn’t been seeing much of also made an appearance and our false spring continued long enough to deice the lake almost completely. The two bays out from Lorber point went from completely iced over to nearly 80 percent open by the end of that week! And the main body of the lake went from ¾ covered to just some clinging shore ice. This rapid ice over/deicing was a first for me in my 24 year history with Lake Nebagamon. I have seen the lake completely iced over and then open up a bit before refreezing but never such a rapid freeze up followed by an almost complete deicing and all in a 2 week period in the month of November to boot, just wild.
Somebody get Paul a coat!
Well, the month wrapped up in just as wild a manor with 2 December like snow storms in the span of just 4 days. The first dropped about 10 inches of snow on us in about 24 hours on the 27th, disrupting my travel plans to the St. Paul, MN area to spend Thanksgiving with my family. It was a wind packed, lake effect enhanced storm that dropped two inches each hour. The second storm has been promised to be greater than the first according to the local meteorologists. It is predicted to bring us 12-18 inches of snow over the next 2 days. Fortunately this morning we did not wake to the predicted 2-inches-per-hour snow fall of the first half of the storm and the howling winds predicted have barely reached the level of a breeze. The real radar images are nothing like the “future radar” imaginings of the “modals”, European or American. It seems that all of the dire predictions and stay in place warnings have been premature, at least for day one. Things are looking pretty dicey over the Dakotas currently on the radar though, so who knows, maybe tomorrow will be a real blaster and we might get the 12-18 inches predicted. I hope not, because that much snow all at once won’t allow me to get the trails in camp groomed for skiing because the “Miracle on Snow”, my 1975 Artic Cat Pantera snowmobile, can only handle about 8 inches at a time!
Keeping an eye on the weather radar to see if this storm will boom or bust its Caretaker Joe, At Camp.