It's a good old fashioned blizzard!

The past couple of days have been pretty rough around southern Saskatchewan. We've had quite the blizzard. Usually the area around our town doesn't get a lot of snow, at least not in the past dozen years or so. Usually a blizzard meant an inch or two of snow and howling wind. Not this time. We've probably gotten six inches or more this time.

It started snowing a couple of days ago with just a breeze, but it piled up a couple of inches of snow that drifted a little. I brought out the skidsteer and cleared the trails yesterday morning. It wasn't done, though, because the snow got somewhat heavier throughout the day. Carla was able to get to work at the gas station but we were starting to wonder if she'd be able to make it home when her shift ended at 9pm.

The roads did get treacherous and there was some vehicles getting into trouble on the Trans-Canada Highway that runs by Chaplin. Hopefully that wouldn't happen to Carla! But she did make it home...though she did get stuck at the end of our driveway into the farm yard. I walked out and helped get the van back on the trail and up to the house. We're all home safe and sound! But the storm wasn't over.

That evening we did have the power go out of 20 minutes or so. We were lucky. Some communities would be out for more than a day due to the snow and wind pulling wires off some poles south of the town of Assiniboia.

We woke up the next morning to the snow still falling and the wind really blowing. You wouldn't have known I cleared any snow yesterday. So I fed cows in the morning but held off clearing snow hoping the storm would ease off. Well, it was still going pretty strong after lunch so I went out anyway and pushed a snow for a couple of hours again. The yard was pretty full again, but the wind had actually blown away all the snow that Carla got stuck in last night. Go figure.

So I'm sure I'll be out again tomorrow building my snow piles even higher. The boys love playing on them. Mitchell lost a boot in one this afternoon which I had to dig out. It's a bit of pain in the ass to deal with all this snow, but the land desperately needs it, both to replenish topsoil moisture and to fill dugouts for cattle to drink in the summer. We've had a pretty dry few years. The last time I remember having a really good dump of snow was more than a decade ago.

By the way, the picture above shows my hay bales buried in the snow and in the distance is our neighbor's farm yard half a mile away. Below are a few more of the fun and frivolity of our blizzard!