A short little winter

 Back in the early 1990s we had a stretch of El Niño winters that really put a crimp in non-cycling winter activities. Non-cycling activities are very important to balanced fitness, because cycling is not complete exercise and does not help with bone density. They're also fun, if you're not obsessed with riding and actually enjoy the opportunities that a natural environment and four seasons present to you. So those of us who play outside in all weather felt severely deprived and grumpy. We hadn't seen anything yet.

Climate change hadn't hit the headlines as much as it does now that it's nearly too late to do anything about it. A few of us connected the dots, but didn't bother to discuss it with a public still happily in denial about "natural variations." And New England is notorious for variations. Our reputation is international. One November day a few years ago, I was helping out at a local half marathon that started and finished at the Castle in the Clouds, in Moultonboro, NH. The day was a typical gray, but mild. As I hung on in the back of a pickup truck cruising the course to pick up traffic cones and signage after the race, I remarked to the Chinese student helping out from a local prep school that the year before had been harshly cold on the same basic date.

"Well, that's New England," he said. Our reach is global.

The range of variation has reached the level of insanity. The flooding in the earlier part of the winter hit the national news. We finally picked up 6-12 inches of fluff on January 2, followed a couple of days later by snow so saturated with water that it landed as about five inches of slop. The fluff had packed down to an inch or two on trails. The slop destroyed some of it, and turned the rest to mush. Another storm right after that was even wetter. Then temperatures finally turned wintry before another five inches of light powder came in on January16. Nighttime temperatures flirted with 0 F for several nights, with daytime highs in the teens or 20s. That ends now, as the temperature climbs steeply to the useless range it occupied earlier. As if that wasn't enough, rain is coming in on Thursday and Friday to wreck the natural cover on cross-country ski trails.

Thanks, Corporate America!

Funny thing: because Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro have been favorite summer home areas for wealthy people for about a century, the beneficiaries of the political system that was bribed to ignore the environment and corrective regulation for decades has a well established colonial presence here. A certain family is sentimentally buying up local landmarks and attractions to preserve their theme park and maintain the servant population that they've grown accustomed to seeing. One contingent donated a good chunk to the cross-country ski association's fundraising drive to put in a little bitty snowmaking loop at staggering expense, to try to keep going in the face of the climate disaster made worse by their own oligarchic greed.

The climate countered by hitting us with really poor snowmaking conditions. These combined with the fact that the snowmaking crew is shared with the town's little downhill ski area. The downhill ski area took precedence, so the cross-country loop remained uncompleted until just this week.

As a person ages, deterioration proceeds unnoticed during periods of inactivity. You feel fine just toddling through the necessary activities of life, with maybe a twinge here or there when you lift something the wrong way. But as soon as you try to get back up to speed in things that were well within your capability, like a hike, or a ski tour, or bike commuting more than a couple of miles, you feel what you have lost.

I had to work on the best days of our mini winter. Up before the sun, off to work, stuck in the shop until after dark, days slip by. The leaping sunrises and lingering twilights warn that bike commuting season will arrive in a very short eternity. The light will be here long before the weather is nice. And even though first light to last faint gloom extends almost 12 hours already, sunrise to sunset is only about nine and a half hours. No matter what the weather does, the light travels at the same speed. The planet bows toward its partner the sun in the stately dance of seasons. It takes a long time, even at thousands of miles per hour. 

The temperature might shift back at times before we move into official spring, but the overall trend is warmer than average. I always wonder if the average is the ancestral average, or the new average, which creeps or leaps steadily higher. Our mini winter might be followed by one or more little repetitions. If we're lucky, one of them might coincide with the Massachusetts school vacation week, which is our biggest earning period of the winter. After that, numbers dwindle to the few who are already interested and an even smaller number of curious samplers.

It ain't really winter 'til your nose hairs freeze

 Every time we get a weak winter, I compare it to my memories of 1990-'91 and 1991-'92, the two that stood out for late arrival of snow, little accumulation, and overall mildness. The winter of 2005-'06 was another disaster for winter-based industries in New England, in which I recall doing more riding than skiing or other winter-specific activities. But a check of the records shows that in all of those winters we had at least some short periods of usable winter, and a few nights of nose hair freezing cold.

Your results may vary, but I find that nose hairs begin to freeze as the temperature nears 0°F, and intensifies as the temperature continues to drop. For instance, someone misread our digital thermometer and told me that it was 17°F one morning, but I knew as soon as I walked out and breathed in that it was 1.7°. 

When I'm stacking firewood into the shed in the summer, I often think about what conditions will be like when I reach that part of the pile during the dark and frigid months. I can recall many images of shivering under the cold LED light in the shed, pulling down an armload of logs to keep the wood stoves cranking against the implacable cold of the universe, toward which our end of the planet is pointed during the northern hemisphere's turn to aim away from the sun. This winter, just about every trip to the woodshed has been more like late March, or even April, except for the sun angle and day length.

I could post this as a ski column on Explore Cross-Country, but there is no skiing, and there might never be. It should surprise no one that this is the warmest, wettest, least useful winter on record, at least until the next one. We're already getting calls about bike service, not from winter riders, but from people who want to get a jump on their spring tuneups. We still have demand for ski services, so we don't want to reconfigure the workshop for grease, but we may need the income soon. It's still too early for full bike shop efficiency, so the wise rider will wait until at least mid-March, but that could change if winter-specific demand dries up.

I did notice in my training diaries from the 1990s, that I took more opportunistic rides back then. The training diary is also my daily quick summary of weather conditions, which I started adding right around that time, to give my other activity entries more context. Now I find that I really miss the hour or so that I carve out for a ride or a hike, when I have so much other stuff to get done on a day off. From the perspective of age, it seems that the people who get things done are the ones who long ago sacrificed their health, and fitness to the priorities of work. It shouldn't have to be that way, but any better way takes too much thought and care for each other's well being, to make sure that anyone who wants it can have a balanced existence.

The other argument against too much riding is that a rider needs weight-bearing exercise for bone density, and to use the body in different ways that relieve the muscles and joints from the limited range of motion provided by pedaling. You can do weight training, and definitely should stretch in some way, but for the unscientific trainer it's easiest to go do something else. Yesterday, I hiked up the mountain behind my house. I probably won't do it again, because the logged areas are now choked with brambles and sweet fern, and the uncut swaths are filling in with bushy little saplings flourishing because so much sunlight can get in. With decent snow, the brambles and sweet fern are at least somewhat covered and separated by it. Yesterday, I was either wading through the thorns or pushing through the beech thickets to try to gain a few yards on the remnants of the old forest floor.

Because I started late, I did not gain a summit, only one of the intermediate steps that offered a view westerly. To the north I saw that Ossipee Lake is not fully frozen. That is not a deep lake. I know that the big lake, Winnipesaukee, isn't frozen shut, but it is deeper and much larger, requiring a longer, harder freeze. Even giant mud puddles like Province Lake had such thin ice that the ferocious winds of the storm on December 23 broke it all up and piled it on the leeward end, where it refroze into a surface useless for skating. I remember a hike in about 1997, on a small range just over the border in Maine, from which I saw the startling blue of Sebago Lake, unfrozen in a landscape of white. We did have some snow that winter, although as climate change really started to sink its claws into the region, the weird sight of open water provided a warning to the few who cared to acknowledge it.

A native of the area used to say that he hadn't noticed much change in the climate, even up to a couple of years ago, but he has been pretty quiet about it recently. I doubt if his nose hairs have frozen any more than mine have, even if he does live in one of the colder little valleys. And, as a logger, he knows darn well that the wetlands haven't firmed up to allow the normal amount of winter cutting.

No matter how much the temperature warms, the sun angle and day length won't change. There will be more losses than gains, from many economic sectors. People have already reported ticks. Various unpleasant insects are expanding their ranges. The purifying freeze, as hard as it might feel at the time, serves a purpose for the overall health of the ecosystem. Unfrozen lakes in winter warm sooner and reach higher temperatures, aiding things like cyanobacteria, which ruins summer recreation after a warm winter ruined that season's recreation. Cyanobacteria can kill your dog. And it's not that great for humans.

We're only at the beginning of winter's July. There's plenty ahead. Averages are made of highs and lows, so we could get slapped with a little cold snap. The longer it takes to get here, the harder it will bite, because we can't help instinctively feeling like spring when the temperature mimics it. As the sun launches more and more steeply up the morning sky, the first half of a mild day will make you forget how much winter still lies ahead, until the instant shift to late afternoon light reminds you. The sunset is getting noticeably later, but it darn sure isn't late.