Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Alayne and I had perfectly timed — or so we thought — our hay move this week so we could have our volunteers help us pick up a load tomorrow, on Saturday.  One of the volunteers who had planned to come out was Beth, who was our first employee and is now teaching and working in Missoula.  Beth had emailed to say, "And…can we please move a load of hay?  For some reason, I’ve been extraordinarily eager to do that!"  So we had a full day of activities planned for a large group of wonderful volunteers on Saturday.

Well, and then along came the weather.  We’d had snow showers all morning and a steady 14 mph wind all day, blowing the snow in sideways.  By noon today the National Weather Service had issued a winter storm warning for tomorrow beginning at 6 a.m.:

A POWERFUL WINTER WEATHER SYSTEM WILL BRING 10 TO 20 INCHES OF SNOWFALL TO THE MOUNTAINS AND 3 TO 6 INCHES TO THE LOWER ELEVATIONS BY EARLY SATURDAY EVENING. IN ADDITION…SOUTHERLY WINDS OF 25 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 55 MPH WILL CAUSE SIGNIFICANT BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW…ESPECIALLY IN THE HIGHER TERRAIN. LOCAL WHITEOUT CONDITIONS ARE PROBABLE.

So I dashed off an email to the volunteers this afternoon, advising them to stay home tomorrow and stay safe.  Then Alayne and I realized, dang, we’d better go get some hay before this thing blows in!  I went and got the sanctuary truck, the Chevy Silverado we call the "Big Dog," and backed it up to the flat-bed trailer.  I lined the ball on the hitch up with the tongue of the trailer, and started to crank the handle on the trailer nose-jack to lower it down.  It dropped a few inches and then sat there, the handle cranking but nothing happening.  It might have iced up inside or it might be a mechanical problem, but there was no time to figure it out.

We went and got our personal truck, a Dodge Ram 2500, and headed over to our neighbor’s hay barn to get some bales.  Alayne and I were able to stack 22 bales in the bed on the first run and 26 on the second run (I got smarter at the stacking business).  I took the photo late this afternoon just before we unloaded the second run into Scout’s Barn.  The wind was still howling but the snow had quit.  And there’s the non-functioning flat-bed trailer.  Maybe it just wanted a day off?

You may be able to see the shovel and crowbar leaning up against the barn door.  We had a melt-off earlier this week with temperatures in the high 30s, so the snowmelt collected around the base of those sliding doors and then — of course — froze again.  So I had to whack and chip at the ice to free the door in order to slide it all the way open.  That’s kind of how today went!

(Click on photo for larger image.)