Storms, Trees and Equisetum

2-21-11 VERMONT: The ladies have been here and gone. They’re doing the college tour today and then back to Long Island. We have had the usual potpourri of New England weather—warm, cold, sunny and clear, overcast and snow. We had a dusting of snow this morning but now have sun and wind blowing the new stuff around. The soft snow from the warm spell is now frozen solid, and the dogs are running around and only occasionally break through. Snowshoeing was much easier on the crusted snow, and today I tried it without snowshoes and was OK as long as I stayed on the compacted trail.


Gus is not sitting, he's standing in shoulder-high soft snow from the warm days.

Chloe walks on [frozen] water.

When the weather changed, we had a front come through like a summer T-storm. We had high wind and thunder, but little precip. Trees were taken down all over the state. Our power was out for most of Saturday and the phones were out for two days. CVPS and Fairpoint were both here repairing their respective utilities, and now we’re waiting for the alarm company to repair their system.

A neighbor was kind enough to call us from NJ to tell us a tree in our yard had been damaged by that same ill wind. I contacted Franks Tree, and they will take care of it. They will need a crane to pluck that huge spruce off the ash tree that it’s leaning on. They also have to take the adjacent spruce whose root system was damaged by the incident. That makes about five trees we’ve lost in the past couple of years to violent weather. I think it’s due to climate change putting more energy in the atmosphere. Soon we’ll be living in the Garden State Desert.


Windfall?


Here's that Equisetum, horsetail, fossil that I mentioned a few days ago. This piece of sandstone is from the Carboniferous Era, 350 million years ago-give or take 50 million years. You can see the shoots in cross-section and lengthwise, as well as some roots or stolons connecting the clusters on the bottom of the rock.