winter wonders

winter wonderland! We snowshoed back to the river, what a wonderful way to get around in winter. Silent shoeing, the snow muffles all the sounds, and it's so quiet and fluffy out there! Beautiful. The river remains unfrozen. Curiously, this year seems to be an odd one. The snow came all at once and in huge volume, so that the ground has had serious insulation on it all this time. Despite the cold, this year the ground is only frozen down about 4 inches or so! Snow has marvelous insulating capacity, birds and small mammals burrow under it and can stay up to forty degrees warmer than the outside air temperatures. That's pretty amazing! One of those little creatures is a little white weasel that lives in our wood pile. We've seen him just a couple of times, but he is white as can be and seems quite at his leisure out there in the snowy white outdoors. And frankly, his insulation is as good as ours!