Mid November....

Well, here it is mid-November, where's the snow?  It's not here.   It's not on the ground. It's not in the forecast, not a flake.  Even all the way out through next week.  There's a chance of rain but the freezing level is going up to 9000 feet!  It's mid-November. 9000 feet?  Come on!

This past week the skies have been crystal clear, but temps have been in the teens and a windstorm left us without power for 24 hrs.  We even dragged out the generator so we could watch a movie on the laptop.  Romantic?  No, not really.  The only upside of clear skies is that the crew working on the new chair lift has had some great days to get cracking on that.  It's not every day you see a new chairlift being built and it's been pretty cool!  I wish I could show you the shiny new towers but the day I hiked up I forgot my camera (duh, right?).  That's okay, I will be able to show you them in action this winter.  In the mean time, here's a picture of the Chinook that was helping the crew place the towers and remove logs from the slope.  It was here in the neighborhood for 3 or 4 days and even flew on the day with 40 mph wind gusts.  It was a lot of fun to watch!

As you can see, some of those logs were really, really big!  That one in the bottom picture in particular was probably hundreds of years old.  Coincidentally, we had just watched the X-Files episode about the loggers ....the ones who went missing...the ones hunted down by insects hatched out of old growth timber?  And Scully and Mulder end up trapped in giant cocoons.....??  Remember??   Well, I believe. :)