Hot topic, at least for now - Ice caves!

Another 11,000+ visitors came to see the ice caves today.  Our B&B guests spent most of 6 hours today getting to Meyers Beach--the starting point--and then walking out onto Lake Superior to make the trek over to the caves.  The weather was perfect--sunny and temps in the upper 30's, so it was a perfect day on the Lake.

Our pilot friend Carri posted a Facebook account from a friend who flew up here from Oshkosh (I think) today to see the caves.  Check out the link above to see the rest of his pictures, but I was interested in seeing the crystal clear ice he had to land on with the ice on the rock walls behind him.

They don't allow any motorized vehicles within a certain distance of the National Lakeshore area, so he had to land a distance away from the shore.  THEN he had to TIE DOWN his plane so it didn't "ski" away while he was away checking out the caves.  He did this with ice screws and apparently it worked great.  Last year Carri landed her plane out on the Lake on the day we were there, but then there was a think layer of snow so tying it down might have been easier.  There's something about ice that clear and that smooth on that BIG Lake that just fascinates me!

And finally, below is the crew of eight or nine deer that shows up every late afternoon around 5:30 to see what's what in the feedbox in our back yard.  They are usually pretty feisty with each other.  The bullies get up on their hind legs and "box" the others away with their front hooves.  It explains the marks and scars that some of them have on their backs.  

Time to change the clocks again!  I like this one best because it means spring will soon be here!

Getting back on the horse!

Today I received a gentle reminder "through the ether" that I have neglected my blogging habit in the last month.  To say I was too busy to blog would not be the truth.  I'm retired, it's winter and it has been REALLY cold out...until today, so what's my excuse?  I have none, so let's move on.

It's only March and, thanks to weeks of cold weather, the ice caves are accessible again this year so we're back in the B&B business!

Section of ice caves visible from the wave observation camera

Last weekend the National Park Service opened them for the first time and I've heard anywhere from 11,000 to 14,000 people flocked to see them last weekend.  We didn't!  The lineup of visitors' cars parked along the side of the road was said to be four miles long.  Then a storm brewed up on Tuesday and they were closed to visitors Tuesday and Wednesday.  The winds were going to be quite fierce and they didn't know what that would do to the ice cover on the lake and the ice formations hanging on the rocks.  But, the storm ended and they opened them up to visitors again this morning at 7am.  So, we have guests all weekend.  Temps up in the 40's are predicted for next week--it might be a short season!

Below is a scene of snow blowing across Lake Superior on Tuesday.  Those winds caused lots of whiteout conditions and drifted roads over those couple of days.

And thanks to the winds, these interesting designs showed up along the road on my walk on Wednesday.

And another update from the last month, our church had another Mardi Gras event that doubled as a Pampered Chef fundraiser.  If you are familiar with Pampered Chef products, they are really nice--and, yes, expensive--pots and pans and kitchen gadgets that we are invited to buy from their catalog.  And unfortunately the woman who demonstrates all the products is REALLY good at her job!  So now we have some new kitchen gadgets in our house and thanks to all the people attending, the church did well in the fundraiser!

Leann has been doing some furniture finishing on these new bed stands in our Woodland Room.  We bought them as unfinished furniture and she put several coats of some kind of poly finish on them.   It's always hard to find furniture with a natural finish that isn't maple or oak or something too dark for everything else in the house.  So she did these two tables, another bed stand and an end table in the living room.

One of my last posts talked about my family picture organization project.  So after going through and scanning hundreds (thousands?) of pictures from all of my extended family and my own children, I am left with the EMPTY boxes on the left, and the very organized boxes and notebooks on the right.  Somehow I thought I'd be getting rid of a little more stuff...

And, we're still feeding deer and birds, usually not intentionally at the same time.  Below is "Mouse Ears" outside our window caught in the act of lapping up sunflower seeds from the bird feeders.  Yes, we see you!

I'm back on my blogging horse now.  By the way, I began this blogging thing a year ago on February 20th.  I'm up to 29 countries now.  I'd better hang on so I can reach some more!

After the clean-up comes the burn

One of the satisfactions that comes with cleaning out junk is actually disposing of it--removing it from your life.  Today the conditions were right for a good burn--no wind, snow on the ground--so we took all of the papers we cleaned out yesterday and hauled them out to our on-going burn pile.

 It was all pretty uneventful until an small airplane flew over our house REAL LOW and, of course, my first thought was that it was because of our--very little--fire.  And besides, I had just this week signed up online with DNR for our yearly burning permit, and as I said, conditions were safe for burning.  But we watched the plane flying north then right away it veered to the right and flew over the lakeshore towards the location of the ice caves. We decided it might have been people from a news agency checking out the ice situation.  And just now on the 10pm news, they reported on the LACK of any good ice yet this year.  Oh, well...

This photo below, posted on Facebook just now, was taken by my neighbor, David McRoberts, showing the area by the ice caves but taken from a spot up above and looking down to the water from up high.  He must have hiked over there from Meyers Beach or some other good access point.  Lots of ice hanging down but no ice to walk on!

And just a few more pictures from today...  This is one of the oldest trees in the orchard by our house and it's still loaded with apples!  Hmmm...what can you do with frozen apples?

After the burning was over we drove over to Herbster for lunch.  There we saw this pretty impressive piece of equipment used to groom the snowmobile trails.  I just checked the Bayfield County snowmobile trail report, and the description there for trail conditions was only "fair."  Can't believe I'd say this, but we really need snow!

Herbster has a beautiful beach and campground right next to the water, but the wave action is coming a little too close to the shore and trying to wash away the road.  Everything is still drivable but it could be an interesting spring for this location and others.

This is the same Herbster beach looking east.  Imagine yourself on a warm July evening sitting by your tent and campfire, and listening to the waves washing up to the sand.  Yes, there's snow and ice piled up there now...that's why I said "imagine!"

And finally, on our trip home we looked up and saw this eagle in the tree looking out over the lake.  It looks like a lump, but, really, it's an eagle.

That's all for today!

A post-winter check on Quarry Beach - jackets, not sunscreen, needed!

 Quarry Beach is one of the hidden gems in our little town of Port Wing.  When the town was first founded in the late 1800's, this was the site of a sandstone quarry where stone workers quarried out large pieces of Port Wing brownstone that was destined to be building materials for many structures.  The passage below lists some of the buildings where the brownstone was used, and I copied it from this website detailing the history of the Port Wing Quarry:

Stone from Port Wing was used in the Wisconsin Building at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. It was also used in William Jennings Bryan's home in Lincoln, Nebraska; George Crosby's home in Duluth; and the Martin Patterson Mansion in Superior. The Department of Interior Building in Washington D.C. was constructed of Port Wing Brownstone. These are only a few examples of well-known structures in which our stone was used.

Locally, the basement floor of the Port Wing School, the foundation of the Lutheran Parsonage, and the O.T. Bagstad warehouse were constructed of Brownstone.

Now today, the old quarry is a favorite place to hang out at the beach and look at Lake Superior.  The pictures above and below show how it looks on a typical, beautiful summer day.  Those of us living on the "South Shore" like to promote our long, sandy beaches, compared with the rocky shores on the Minnesota and Canadian "North Shore."

View looking toward the town of Port Wing

Since today is NOT a summer day, the view is a little different.  The north wind was blowing like crazy, so the nice blue sky makes it looks more comfortable than we felt.

This was what we found today:

Again, we are looking east toward town, but the first 100+ feet of beach out to where the waves are crashing is lots of ice in layers and piles.  And the extent of the "sandy beach" is quite narrow right now.  We will need to make frequent trips to see how it changes as the ice melts.

This is the view looking northwest, same view as the first picture above.  Over toward the trees is usually a good place to hunt for "pretty rocks" (I have never found an agate in my life!) but it looked too treacherous to check for rocks today!

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And finally, I just have to share something I saw posted by Bayfield County Tourism on Facebook today, and I'm just kicking myself that I didn't think of it first!  I'm going to put the link here because the YouTube page didn't give me the option to embed it.  

Seven months in a minute and a half!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM1uVevri7c

Ice Shove last weekend, today Ice Circles!

A while back a friend here in town told us about seeing Ice Circles (also called Ice Disks or Ice Pans) here in Port Wing down at the Lake.  They sounded pretty cool and I wondered at the time if we'd ever be able to see them.  It seemed like it would be just a happenstance to be there just when the conditions would be right for them to form.  The Internet articles about them say they form by spinning, bumping against one another to round out the edges, and then with the right weather conditions frost forms around the borders to define their shapes.

Well...this morning while we were sitting in the Ford car dealer waiting for our car to be serviced, and thanks to their wifi I checked my recent favorite site - and you know that site is the ice caves camera.  And this is what I saw:

Ice circles!  This picture was from April 30th and they stayed around until about noon when the winds & waves moved them on somewhere else.  

Today on our way back home, we stopped in at Meyers Beach where all the winter Ice Cave action took place a couple months ago.  It all looked much more peaceful than when we were there in February, and the wayside seems to have recovered pretty well.  I stood on the steps leading to the beach and I could see more of these ice formations.  However, it was too far away to take a picture.  

So we drove on towards home and then Leann took us on a little detour to check out the wildlife (pictures below) and ended up right along the shore in the town of Herbster.  (By the way, they have the BEST campsites here in the summer.  The tent sites are right along the lake, RVs are across the road. Beautiful!) And this was the view there:

Again, the ice circles are there but they are hard to see because I wasn't close enough or high enough to photograph them. So we drove on the Port Wing to our own harbor area, and I finally got a picture of them!

Other sights of the day:

Two sandhill cranes.

As we slowly drove down the road next to where they were, they both lay down like the one on the right.  I don't know if that was a defensive position for camouflage or if they both got tired at the same time.  Then the one on the left stood up, but he's still pretty camouflaged.

A wetland area leading into Bark Bay on Lake Superior.  We thought maybe by this weekend we will begin hearing the "spring peepers" singing away in the pooled water that seems to be everywhere.  No sun but still encouraging!

Little stream leading out into Bark Bay.  It's just so nice to see--and hear--water running.

And we're expecting big weather improvements this weekend!

We have a new neighbor!

A couple years ago, word came to us that someone from here wanted to buy some property for her and her horses.  In a very short time we had sold her 20 acres of our land just across the field from where our new house was going to be, and a short time after that she had fences put up and had moved in her thirteen horses, and as she said, one of every color!

It just seemed like a win-win deal for us--some extra cash for us and our house and the sight of all those pretty horses out there...and no work on our part.  And now she has a beautiful new house for her and a nice stable for her horses, a little pony and two fainting goats.  I guess we do get called once in a while when the horses get out of their enclosure, but we've never been the ones who located the lost sheep, I mean horses.  I really don't think we'd know what to do if we ever found them, but just the searching is part of the adventure.

A week or so ago, she told us that there was going to be a baby horse coming soon, and this past Thursday was the day.  It was born outside in the pasture, but since it was a cold and windy day, she put mother and baby in the stable to keep warm.  But last night on our drive coming back from the Smelt Fry, there was the new baby horse along with his (I think I heard he's a he) protective entourage.  What a cutie!

This pasture is right on my walking route, so I'm sure there will be more pictures to come!

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I just checked the ice caves camera.  Here's the link.  They have been posting pictures every 10 minutes since yesterday and today around noon it finally started breaking up.  By this evening it's almost all gone.  Pretty cool!

Mary's Motley Minutiae #3 - April 21, 2014

It's a beautiful Monday and I'm making it a catch-up day, not catsup or ketchup, but catch-up where I'm updating you on past topics.  And, I've actually had people ask about my yardstick out in the snow, so I'll start with that:

It's so shadowed here, but earlier this afternoon, it was at about 5 inches where the stick goes into the snow.  By the time I looked a while later, it was down to 4 inches.  I'll bet if I looked out now, it will have fallen over.  THEN I'll stick it into the bigger drift behind it which is still about two feet deep.

And our plants are growing...well, some are growing.  The coleus and the scarlet sage are going great and now I'll have to thin them out.  My level of faith when planting seeds isn't always "mustard seed" size, so I often have too many growing at a time or they don't grow at all, which is the case for our rosemary and basil.  Nothing yet for them!

And now that the snow has melted from our driveway and road, I'm back to walking and listening to Swedish lessons on my phone.  I had taken a little break so I thought I may have lost some Swedish momentum, but their method seems to work and it was pretty easy to get on my way again.  

There was lots of water running along the road and under the road through culverts, so the temps in the 60's was taking care of the snow.  Here's one of our neighbor's horse fields with a river running through it.  No horses yet but maybe when the fields dry up a little.

I just heard on the 5:00pm news where they were talking about the Wisconsin Fishing Opener which is scheduled to take place on Saturday, May 3rd.  (They always start a week earlier than Minnesota.) They are fearing a rerun of last May when Wisconsin couldn't have their fishing opener up here in northern Wisconsin because the lakes were still iced over.  In fact, down in Cable where the big Governor's Opener was supposed to be, they groomed cross-country ski trails instead.  And the governor couldn't fly in because of the snow and fog.  So I checked the ice cave camera, and even though we have open water here in Port Wing, there's still ice 20 miles east by the caves.

That's it for today!

The meaning of "creek" in Larson Creek Farm

There are a few times in the year when we can rightly to call the little waterway behind our house a creek.  Those times are in the spring with all the melting snow--in other words, now--and anytime in the summer when we have one of those huge gullywasher (and sometimes scary) rainstorms.  Otherwise it's just a little often dried up tributary heading toward Twin Falls in town and then to Lake Superior.  (We still had to abide by the Bayfield County zoning setback rules for navigable streams, which was that we had to build either 75 or 100 feet back.  I suppose if the rainstorms ever get REALLY scary, I'll be happy to be that far back!)

But here's how it looked today:

Pretty fun to see and hear!

And in checking out the sites in town today, we saw a few other places where water was pooling.  It still pools instead of sinking in because the ground is still frozen.  The "frost hasn't gone out yet," as they say around here.

So here is the corner just down the road from us.  I think they were trying to clear out the culvert underneath the road which is probably frozen, too, but no luck yet.  Our friends who came looking for coffee around 9:00 this morning--(which was almost too early!)--thought this would be something good for the blog.

Then we drove around this afternoon to check out the sites and saw these driveways and fields that are now lakes.  Unfortunately there is still more snow to melt, so they may grow bigger and deeper before evaporation can take over.

At least it isn't going over the road yet in that location like it often does.

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And, I know I said I wasn't going to mention ice caves anymore, but here is the photo from their monitoring camera from 7pm this evening.

Looks pretty soupy to me, and there are two snowmobile trails out there in the middle right that first showed up yesterday morning sometime.  Crazy people!  The one at the bottom closer to shore is some kind of animal...doesn't know enough to be crazy.

"With a bang, a whimper or worse!"

Are you tired of hearing about Ice Caves yet?  We have more B&B guests staying here tonight and tomorrow night, but Sunday it all comes to an end, at least for people trying to visit the ice caves.

So I have just a couple more fun links and pictures I'd like to share about the caves.  First this link from MinnPost.  I've always liked MinnPost because they started up as one of the first online newspapers in Minneapolis-St. Paul several years ago.  And it was kind of a thumb-your-nose move after bigger news agencies bought the local papers and "relieved" some of the good reporters of their jobs.  So MinnPost was started, but back to the caves.

This article is an interview with Superintendent Bob Krumenaker who is in charge of this national lakeshore, and he has probably slept very little since mid-January when the craziness began.  In this article he talks about setting a "Closed" date and how the ice might break up in the next hours/days/weeks...they just don't know when or how.  So that's where the bang/whimper/worse subject comes up.  They have a camera set up all the time so they can monitor how high the waves are for kayakers in the summer.  And it also helps them now to monitor ice conditions.  Read the article and see what happened OVER NIGHT last year, just before they were going to open the caves to visitors!
http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2014/03/apostles-chief-says-ice-route-may-go-out-bang-whimper-or-worse

Below is a link to the website with all of the pictures looking down at the caves area from the last couple of years.
http://wavesatseacaves.cee.wisc.edu/wave_pics.html

Here are some just for fun:

First, from March 1, 2012 - no ice caves that year, there was hardly any snow!  The snowplow only had to plow our driveway twice that winter!

This one (below) is from last year when the conditions changed overnight just before they were going to open.

And below is from today at 2:30pm.  Looks a little damp-ish around those icicles.  People say you can kind of feel some movement under your feet.  Believe me, there was NO movement felt the day we went there!

And below are two other articles by this same MinnPost reporter - one from when it all started and one from yesterday:

• http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2014/03/ice-caves-go-viral-hordes-visitors-swarm-apostle-islands
• http://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2014/03/apostle-islands-ice-caves-will-be-limits-after-sunday-park-service-says

And here below is the Facebook page for the Apostle Island National Lakeshore - The most recent post warns people NOT to stand under the possibly-falling icicles.  A comment mentions something about "thinning the herd!"
https://www.facebook.com/apostleislandsnationallakeshore

So, it's been fun.  This morning I heard on MPR that el niño is heading our way, meaning a probable mild winter next year.  Huh...does that mean we'll lose our main topic of conversation??

If the sign says "Pie," they will come!

It was like an episode from Prairie Home Companion or Lutheran Church Basement Women.  One member of our church, a wise, business-minded woman, had an idea, inspired others with her idea, we all ran with it, and it was a roaring success!

After several weeks of watching HUNDREDS of cars zip through our town on the weekends on the way to the Ice Caves, our wise entrepreneur decided the church needed to cash in on this winter rarity.  So, what else?  We had a bake sale!

A few phone calls this week brought forth tables full of pies, breads, cookies, bars, caramels and more.  And add to that another specialty of one of our women - cream puffs!

The hot coffee and hot chocolate was also a welcome addition to our bake sale items.  

Some people came in and sat around our tables for pie and coffee, and others took their pie and goodies to-go.  

And everyone who came in was so pleasant and cheerful, and, I think, surprised to run into our bake sale now in the middle of winter.

Of course, a lot of work goes into making all of these baked goods, so the organizers of today's event are very appreciative of all the donations that helped make this day such a success.

But the main thing, besides the food, that made our event such a success, the thing that got people to turn off the main road and drive the two blocks down to our church, was an idea from our Pastor Nancy Hanson.  She walked in this morning with this sandwich board - all it said was "PIE," - and THAT'S what slowed people down enough to check us out.  That's her under all that sign and winter clothing!

It was a great day.  LOTS of people who were strangers now know a little more about Port Wing and we are all smiling a little brighter! 

Lake Superior is on the move!

Yesterday we made a quick trip to Duluth and noticed something new near the lakeshore.  The ice is starting to pile up on itself and revealing a beautiful blue, aquamarine color.

I know people visiting the ice caves have seen blue ice in places along the rocky lakeshore, but I don't know if I've ever noticed it just out in the lake like this.  People who know these things say that the ice caves should be good and safe to walk to the caves until the end of March.  Seeing open water out there - I think that dark like out there is open water - tells us that underneath all that ice, the lake currents are very active and we'll have some interesting sights when ALL of the ice starts breaking up.

The media specialist in me had to do a Google search on "blue lake ice" to find out why it looks blue.  And it has to do with the color spectrum and which colors are able to penetrate through the ice crystals.  And I'm NOT a scientist AT ALL so here's one of my sources: http://www.sciences360.com/index.php/blue-ice-12085/

And just because you never know what's going to turn up on a Google search, something I often experienced with unpleasant results as a media specialist with students, one of my queries returned websites showing Lupita Nyong'o's dress from the Academy Awards ceremony last night.  Evidently the color was icy blue!

So, the chairs are waiting.  Come on up.  The weather's fine!
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Swedish update - I can now ask and answer questions regarding whether I can or can't understand Swedish or English.  And I can ask how you are and tell you that I'm just fine or not too bad.  And I can say hello and goodbye.

So for now, heydå!