Peepers

In case you don't know, peepers are a type of small frog that come out of hibernation every Spring to begin a new year and to breed and otherwise enjoy their lives. If you live even in suburbia you've likely heard their call when they pop out to announce to us that their long sleep is over. It's something that I have experienced all of my life, except for the years when I've lived in an urban environment.

For the past three years, generally around this time in the midst of winter, we will have a very powerful warm patch (we don't even have a prolonged winter anymore) and the peepers will emerge and begin to call out, letting us all know that they're here. And for the past two winters I have worried--apparently needlessly--that doom will befall them all. My assumption has been that the next cold snap will catch our thin-skinned amphibian pals by surprise and that they'll all freeze to death and the local population of peepers will become extinct.

But I'm not going to worry about the tiny frogs anymore. It's not as if I don't have enough to worry about. I don't need this yearly burden to bear. The way I figure it now is that they've survived two warm winter thaws and refreezes with no diminished ability to crawl up to fresh air and fill our neighborhood with their pleasant songs. Winter of 2018/19 they did it. Winter of 2019/20 they committed the same act. And here it is Winter of 2020/21 and once more they're singing their itty-bitty lungs out and serenading me.

This year I'm not worrying. They did A-OK the past two winters and avoided a mass die-off. I figure they'll do it again and continue to repopulate the local ecology. My little friends are going to be fine. Maybe that's a good tiding for the rest of us, too.

It's 50 degrees out, headed for the mid-60s. The peepers are singing in the back yard. We're good to go.

 

Hey, Mr. Peeper!

Snow Memories.

When I was a kid in the deep South of the USA, the most wonderful thing that I would see were the infrequent snowfalls we'd get. So beautiful and fun to play in. But the most depressing thing was to watch it taper until the storm was over, melting until it was all just a memory.

Currently it's snowing. Just light snow showers. But we only get to see this kind of thing but rarely. It did snow briefly last week, no accumulation. And it's snowing now but the last I heard we're not supposed to get any accumulation. Winter is fading fast and will be over soon. I'd be surprised if we get any snowstorm that leaves any accumulation this season, but I suppose it could happen.

If I didn't have my part-time job tomorrow I'd head up to the mountains where the high country is supposed to get several inches of snow. One more reason, I think, to get rid of the part-time job. I've cut it back to two days a week. Maybe zero would be best. Life is, after all, quite short.

Blackwater Falls in a snowstorm.

Deer in Cades Cove, February of 2014.

Two deer in the snow at Blackwater Falls State Park, WV.

Me, on the Alum Cave Bluffs Trail near the summit of Mount LeConte in March 0f 2005.

Same trail, no people.

The Park

We live in a neighborhood that the residents call "The Park". Most of the houses here date from the very late 50s through the early 70s. Occasionally there is new construction as some of the residents split their two-acre lots and sell off the excess. For some reason one two-acre lot remained vacant for over sixty years, but a new house is going up there now.

The Park started as a decent amount of wooded land. Three main streets with some bridging roads that connect them were graded and thus it began as a neighborhood. The lots here vary from half an acre to two acres in size. The lot where we live (my wife's father built this house in 1961) is two acres, as he was an avid gardener and wanted a full half acre to farm vegetables.

It's a very pleasant place to live. It's no longer the rural retreat it was when the lots were first offered to prospective builders, but it still is very nice, very peaceful, and relatively quiet. The cities of Charlotte and Huntersville have--as with all cities--expanded their urban tentacles to surround it, but it still has a rural feel to it. Rabbits live in the shrubs, whitetail deer wander out of the forests that still surround the Park, foxes are here, along with coyotes, hawks, falcons, and a host of other bird species.

The past couple of days have been a lot of fun for me. This part of North Carolina rarely gets snowfall as it did decades back. In fact, it has been about six or seven years since we have witnessed any decent snowfall. But we got a very good storm that lasted most of a day and ended up dropping around eight inches of snow in our yard.

Last night when I got home from my part-time job I bundled up and went for my regular hike. I do a loop that's a bit over a mile in length, but it was especially nice to hike it in the night during a light snowfall. The road was frozen and I had the loop to myself. It was nice. And when I woke this morning I bundled up again (it was in the low teens) and hiked it once more before the sun and higher temperatures made off with the wonderful coating of white.

Winter rarely arrives here, and when it does I enjoy the season and the weather and the experience of it. I am fully aware of how tedious cold weather can be for those who live in places where winter hangs on and will not release its grip. But it's not like there here and I treasure the moments when cold and snow visit the landscape.

Where we live.

Part of the back yard with an azalea bed coated in snow, my travel trailer in our vast parking lot beside the old garden area.

The road in front of our house as I carefully walked the icy route.

A Walk Through the Park.

You Have to Go High.

Here in Charlotte it just doesn't snow that often. Fewer and fewer snow days down here in the Piedmont as the effects of human-caused global warming become more pronounced each year.

Carole and I enjoy the snow. We're big kids at hear and we like to experience a good snowfall from time to time. We like to play in it like all of the other children. There are a couple of sleds in the barn out back.

But since there is almost never an opportunity in the Charlotte metro-area to experience a good snowfall, we find that we have to head to the high country to find it. Fortunately, we have the highest mountains in the eastern USA not too far away, and so it's often just a matter of driving for a couple of hours to find the frozen precipitation and where we can look at the beauty of it, breath cold arctic air, and slide around on it like the overgrown children that we are.

When the north winds blow we see the clear, blue skies.

Let's hike in the snow!

At Carvers Gap on the NC/TN line.

On the Appalachian Trail at the summit of Round Bald, 5,826 feet above sea level.

New River Ice.

Carole and I stopped yesterday at the New River State Park here in NC to check out the campground. All of the other state parks were closed due to the snow, but for some reason the state had plowed the roads for this one and had opened the gates. I haven't a clue as to why they opened this one.

What was interesting to us was that the New River was in the process of icing over. There were unending rafts of snow and ice floating on the surface of the river. Given several days of this kind of weather I'm sure the river would freeze over or produce ice jams (I've seen it, but not in a couple of decades). But the weather is supposed to break, and warm up. No ice jams this year.

That's the New River down there. covered in floating ice and snow.

I'll try to post some other video tomorrow.

Rough Weather

We've had a tough winter, for a change. I've actually had to wear my cold-weather gear a lot this year. In the past few weeks we've had really grinding cold, snow, sleet. And the most recent couple of days we've had to deal with delivering mail in freezing rain. There aren't a lot of things more miserable than having to deliver mail in the freezing rain.

Today, on my route, I found this note clipped to a mailbox as I walked from house to house. It was nice to read.

I clipped the name out for privacy.

Last February

Man, the weather has surely been different this winter than last one. This winter...well, we haven't even had a winter. The past two weeks I have worn shorts and short-sleeved shirts to work. And the temperatures have been so high that I've had to deal with humidity and sweating. I don't know about the rest of you, but this human-caused global warming sucks ass. Winter is supposed to be cold at this latitude!

Last year, the ski slopes were deep in heavy snow. The ski resorts rarely had to even use the snow-making machines. It pretty much snowed the entire winter. When Carole and I were in West Virginia and Maryland last February, we saw snowdrifts ten-feet deep. We hiked on packed snow three feet deep in Cathedral State Park. It snowed almost continuously during our visit there.

Now we're back to these hellishly abnormal weather patterns caused by the release of carbon that had been sequestered in the Earth's crust for hundreds of millions of years.

The Earth is screwed.

Winter in Linville Gorge

Too busy to post much today. I always liked this photo I took just after an ice storm last year in Linville Gorge.


The entire forest was crackling with the sound of weakening ice and dropping bits of frozen water. It was an amazing experience and one which I utilized in my new novel, THE CLAN.

Winter is Going

Winter is pretty much gone here in the Carolinas. NOAA says that Banner Elk will get some snow over the next couple of days, but I think it could very well be a last hurrah for the mountains. Of course late March has seen some kickass snowfalls in the NC/TN/VA high country. But more than likely we've seen the last of the big snows for this winter. In honor of the fading cold and the lengthening days and warmer winds, here are a few snow photos from this year.