Imbolc Stock Show Moon
The snow. A lot more overnight. Beautiful, foggy on Black Mountain. Lodgepole branches white and bowing toward the earth awaiting a wind to slough off the snow. We become snow hermits, watching the flakes fall in our forested backyard, feeling a part of the mountain in a way not possible under other weather conditions.
It’s funny, but the snow, which dominates life when it comes in this quantity, is more important than Cruz beating Trump or Bernie tieing Hillary. We are apart from the lower, literally lower, 48 states, sitting up here on Shadow Mountain surrounded by other peaks and covered in white. The dominant note here is silence. Politics are too noisy, too bright and colorful to matter. And faraway.
This will change of course. In the way of Colorado the roads will be clear soon. The driveway, after I blow it, will also clear. The quiet will last a while though, as will the snow in the yard. Even warmer temperatures won’t touch that in the near term.
Right now our solar panels have a snowy cap maybe a foot deep, so no electricity from them until a melt. I’m going to investigate deep cycle batteries and see if there’s a combination of deep cycle batteries and our generator that might carry us off the grid entirely. That is not yet, however. For now we’re relying on IREA to pump electricity into our system.
