New Year's Day event canceled!

The New Year's Day ski/snowshoeing event is canceled due to the lack of snow!

The last three winters we have had lots of early December snow which stayed and stayed, making a New Year's ski/snowshoe event possible. One tends to forget that southern Wisconsin is not really in the "snow belt". Bits of light snow here and there. Lots of very cold days in January and February. Perhaps some huge wet snows in the spring. (The night my daughter Emily was born, Apr. 9, 1973, we had almost two feet of heavy wet snow. The whole city closed down.) But snow that provides for predictable cross-country skiing/snowshoeing is rare. That's why they hold the Birkebeiner race in Hayward.

I delved through my hard disk and found lots of snowless winter photos for Pleasant Valley Conservancy, such as the one shown here (taken January 3, 2007). In those years, we got used to doing most of our brush cutting in the winter.