he Lyman Lakes on Carleton’s campus are still mostly iced over, after many above-freezing days (including today, though it’s gray and gloomy). Ice is remarkably durable stuff.
Upper Lyman Lake is still mostly iced over, nearly two-thirds of the way through March.
Lower Lyman Lake, on the other hand, is still about half iced over, though as late as Wednesday all of the open water here was still covered.
Exactly midway through our pre-dinner bike ride around the block tonight, Vivi hopped off her trike, climbed on up on this retaining wall, and lay down on the grass. “Vivi,” I asked, “what are you doing?” She looked over at me and said matter-of-factly, “I’m doing a sunbathe!” I couldn’t disagree.
As seen from the seat of my bike.
1. Numerous singleton mittens and gloves, most thickly distributed near bus stops.
2. Decomposing dead animals on the now-exposed roadsides.
3. Thick strips of plowed earth along the edges of the fields, where it’s dry enough for the tractors.
4. Harley riders heading loudly toward the country roads east of Northfield.
5. The Carleton grounds crews tidying flower beds, trimming trees and shrubs, and sweeping away tons of sand.
6. Balding middle-aged men driving their two-season sports cars.
7. The reddening tips of our maple tree branches, getting ready to bud next month.
Never mind the endowment’s slow growth, delayed building maintenance, the lack of pay raises last year, or helicopter parents: the real threat to campus is beavers. It looks like a beaver (or three) took care of a tree that had already been neatly trimmed with a chainsaw. 
Sometimes spring skiing is great: warm temperatures, sunshine, interesting and fun snow. Today was not that day here in Northfield, but goddamn if I didn’t have One Last Ski™ – a solid and sweaty hour in conditions that included foot-deep slush, inch-thick ice, and various obstacles. I prefer to think of these obstacles as increasing the technical difficulty of the course. And thank god for “rock skis”!
Bare Ground
Ten feet further, I had to ski over a foot-wide isthmus of ice between two open expanses of ski-eating gravel.
Deer Crap
Perhaps the fiftieth collection of deer crap on the trail.
Standing Water
You can’t really see it, but there are numerous inch-deep puddles of water here on this “snow.”
I guess winter is well and truly over. Yeah, we might get one last storm, but even a colossal one won’t save the skiing, which is now finished until December – November if I’m really lucky.
This isn’t all bad. The snow looks horrible right now – brown, filthy, icy junk – so it definitely needs to go. We could use a few solid rainfalls to wash the grit off the pavement, cleaning it up for rollerskiing. I think my skiing improved quite a bit this winter, which encourages me to try to use RS’ing and other “ski specific” workouts to maintain some of my form and strength. I don’t want to start from scratch next winter.
Though this week has been gray and damp, I hope we get a string of warm, sunny days to dry off the Arb trails and the gravel roads. I haven’t run since November, but I can’t wait to get back into the Arb for some nice muddy runs. And a few long bike rides on the endless gravel roads would be an even better way to welcome spring.
The temperature hit about 45° F here on Sunday afternoon, which thus might well have been our last moment for winter fun. We made most of it, building two snowmen with our neighbor friend (who just learned how to do rabbit ears) while a cardinal serenaded us from the tip top of a nearby tree. Not a bad sendoff for winter, if that’s what it was.
Adding to my unintentional but now tripartite (part 1 and part II) chronicle of the spring melt here in Northfield, another compare and contrast.
The girls, our next-door-neighbor, and I built big snowman (probably a good 5’5″) in the backyard on Christmas Day. Below, he appears on the day of his creation and this morning, on what might be his last day as anything but a stub. When we build a big snowman next year, I’ll remember not to put him at the exact bottom of the sledding hill: more than one run this winter ended by crashing into his backside.
The lovely curved benches out from of Laird Hall at Carleton are emerging from the colossal snowbanks which have buried them since Christmas. It’s not much, but it is a sign of spring.
BEFORE THE CHRISTMAS STORM (12/23/09)
AFTER A WEEK ABOVE FREEZING (3/4/10)
This afternoon, after another 40-degree day, I noticed this stark evidence that the sun is still quite southerly right now. The snow on the north side of the sidewalk is melting rapidly; the snow on the south side is mostly untouched. If only this could be harnessed to ensure skiable ski trails in June.
Along with some friends, the girls and I enjoyed a long walk in the Arb on Saturday afternoon, soaking up the sun and visiting a huge igloo that some Carleton students put up a few months ago. As Julia’s posture shows, these photos are from before the walk and after it.
For nordic skiers in the US and other snowy regions of the world, late winter means ski marathons – long races that focus the fitness built up all fall and winter into some tough competition. The biggest ski marathon of them all, the 90 kilometer (56 mile) Vasaloppet, takes place in a couple weeks in Sweden; the biggest ski marathon in North America, the famed Birkebeiner (50km/31 miles in the freestyle technique or 54km/33.5 miles in the classic), will be run this Sunday in northern Wisconsin.
Though I want to ski both of those races (and others) someday, this ain’t the year.
Instead, I’m going to take advantage of our great snow and good weather and my underused stash of vacation days to ski my own classic-technique “marathon” in Carleton’s Lower Arboretum on Friday. I can get to the magical 50km mark by doing seven laps of my favorite 7.5km loop, which hits a few easy hills and covers lots of flat terrain in three of the Arb’s main ecosystems: tallgrass prairie, upland forest, and oak savanna.
This “Oakebeiner” won’t be a race, much less the Birkie or the Vasaloppet, but by golly it’ll be good enough for this winter – not least because I’ll ski past this beautiful tree fourteen times:
(If any Northfielders want to join me, they will be able to find me in the Lower Arb from about 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. on Friday. I’ll be using the trailhead at the West Gym parking lot as the start/end of each lap.)
The four girls who wait for the bus each morning – my kindergartner, two neighbors who are in first grade, and the preschooler hanger-on – have discovered that the big old snowbank at the stop makes an excellent slide, and that sliding makes the long, cold wait for Bus #14 less cold and long.
I welcomed the Olympic Winter Games by knocking off early and going out for a long ski in Carleton’s Lower Arb. Conditions were magnificent: 20°F, no wind, cloudless blue sky, brilliant sunshine, and brand-new classic tracks everywhere. Fantastic. I love running on these same trails in the summer, but there’s nothing better than skiing on them.
As I looked over my workout log the other day, I realized that the ski sessions I really enjoyed this winter – the ones that I noted with superlatives in the log or remember very clearly – almost all occurred in some sort of precipitation. The best of them, for instance, was a long ski after dark on Christmas Eve, just as the Christmas Blizzard of Ought-Nine hit Northfield. I skied (on very, very familar trails) in a near white-out, got drenched from the outside in and the inside out, and loved it. It’s one of the very few times I’ve skied in Northfield after which I had to scrape off the car before driving home.
Tonight’s ski, my last semi-lengthy one before Sunday’s race, wasn’t quite that good, but thanks to the weird sleet-snow-rain falling from the sky, it was pretty good – relaxing, fun, just slightly tough in a couple key spots. And the best part was seeing all that precipitation in the beam of my headlamp. The glistening little spots of light make everything seem so much faster – like the scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon accelerates and all the stars blur.