Here comes the rain again . . .

The weather continues to be a challenge for our team this winter!

“The past year we’ve gotten about 70 to 75 inches of rain,” says manager Matt Giberson. “It just hasn’t let up; everything’s saturated.” This means that everything’s been a struggle: maintaining equipment, fixing dam erosion, and hitting this year’s sanding targets. “If it’s not raining, we’re getting snow. We get a freeze, then it thaws, then it freezes again; it’s extremely frustrating trying to get a rhythm going. We’ll get two good weeks and get a good chunk of it done, then things freeze up and we can only manage a day here, two days there.” If the weather remained consistently we could try ice sanding, but the frequent temperature changes make that difficult.

The heavy rains this winter have also called a halt to other late-season tasks. “It’s too wet to do any prescribed burning,” Matt says. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to do any this year.” The ground saturation is also causing issues for our or survey lines: “There are certain areas the guys can’t get through; nothing’s frozen over long enough that we feel comfortable sending someone out to work on them.”

In the meantime, the team continues to focus on indoor work! “The biggest thing right now is making gates! We’ve created an assembly line with six guys, and they’re making five gates per day right now; our goal is to try to get to six if we can work out a more efficient process. We’ve made all the sprinklers, but that’s part of regular irrigation maintenance that we do every year; the focus is to recycle and reuse as we need it for emergencies or repairs for spring.”

“The weather is the weather, but it’s still not fun. Two or three inches of rain at a shot, twice a week is a lot of deal with,” Matt says. Here’s hoping for a drier spring! And in the meantime, our team will keep doing whatever it takes to work with Mother Nature.