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The Donner Party Has to Be in Here Somewhere
I mentioned this at the end of our previous trip story –
“The next morning, on the drive home, it was 9° as we drove Benton Crossing Road alongside Crowley Reservoir. Pogonip still enshrouded Lee Vining and Mono Lake. And we just made it home before the next small storm rolled through. Heavy snow is predicted for next week. We’re stocked up on diesel for the tractor and gas for the generator. When will the next break in the storms come?”
Not yet. It has been storming for a month. We’ve had bigger snow dumps in the past, but we cannot recall such an intense continuous series of storms. Lil’ Red, the mighty little Massey Ferguson has gone through 15 gallons of diesel. Our routine for nearly a month has been breakfast, and then get out and clear snow. This is repeated at day’s end. If the snow comes hard, there may be a midday cleanup – to keep up with the clearing. I believe we received over 9 feet of snow. It settles from the weight, so don’t look for 9 feet on the ground. We had a break on March 1st. Enough of a break, at least, to take the camera outdoors.
Here's Lil’ Red’s garage and the starting point for snowblowing.
It takes shoveling to get down alongside the house to the small garage, dig it out, start the tractor, and let it warm up before blowing.
I blow the lower driveway…………
the road down to the neighbor……….
the road up to the county road and through the plow berm….
Note – the sign on the right, above, marks the location of a fire hydrant. We also dug out the hydrant; why not be ready?
…….and our main driveway and parking.
Julie shovels snow into piles to be removed by the big
blower. She also helps with the tilted slopes the wide blower has problems
with. In the photo above, please note the lean to storage area on the left side
of the house. We shoveled this roof as the snow depth and density grew. This was to
prevent possible collapse, it had over 5 feet of snow.
With the blower and tractor, I also clear the driveway and parking for the neighbor below us and the neighbor above on the county road.
Julie does a tremendous amount of physical work shoveling the deck, walkways, and cleaning up the driveways. I help after I get off the tractor.
When it snows, we commonly lose electric power (and we did) from the grid. A transfer switch and small generator power the necessary circuits – lights, propane forced air furnace, refrigerator. We do not power any 240V circuits or the microwave. We have a propane cooktop and propane hot water that are unaffected by power outages. Cable, internet, and landline also, of course, go out. Cell phone generally works if the tower is powered with a generator.
The tools.
The storms continued with the twice a day (or more) clean ups. Here’s three photos from March 5th and what we awoke to every morning.
In the midst of all of this, I heard Julie say something I thought I'd never hear, "Maybe we should move to the desert."
One night Julie asked, "Want to play Scrabble?"
My answer, "My arms are too tired to lift scrabble tiles tonight."
On March 8th we woke to no new snow on the ground. What a relief, for a few minutes. A half hour later the snow began. Three hours later we had 8” of new snow on the ground. The storm broke and we took care of snow clearing again. It warmed and the sun came out. We also started in on shoveling the lean to shed roof, unloading the solar panels (on the backside of the house’s roof. It is important to get the snow off on our terms and not have it avalanche on its own). I took the camera outside. Note, the shed roof is cleared.
Julie had a dream about the roof on the tractor garage collapsing from the snow load. There was no stopping her. We started on the right side from below with the roof avalanche tool.
I set up our secure ladder and dug off the back quarter of the garage roof for access to get up on the roof. Here’s the ladder in place.
Julie, instead, climbed the snow pile and accessed the roof in her own way.
Much of the snow was tossed in front of the garage and I removed it with the big blower.
Besides shovels, we use a roof rake and a roof avalanche tool to clear snow from the roofs and solar panels.
To clear the area at our downstairs, the snow piles grew too high to shovel snow over. We brought out the old walk behind snowblower to blow snow over the piles. We keep it running well as it is the backup in case we have an issue with the mighty Massey Ferguson and big blower.
We did a thorough search as we dug and found no evidence of
the Donner Party. This is a darn good year to be looking for them. Julie is quite proud of the cleared roof on the garage and she sleeps well now.
Today is March 12th. The relentless storms have turned warm. “Atmospheric Rivers” and “Pineapple Expresses” are slamming heavy rain into the Sierra Nevada. The concern now is flooding and heavy rain saturated snow collapsing roofs and buildings. Our local Safeway roof started to fail on Friday, the snow was removed, and the store reopened. Saturday (yesterday) a big crew was shoveling the snow off our community center building. The local paper is reporting other roof collapses in the area. We now are on the lookout for Noah.
