When we went up to bed last night snow was falling. We'd already had an accumulation of about an inch and a half, and more was coming down. By morning or at least sometime during the night the snow stopped and when we came downstairs and looked out there was a fresh virginal white covering over the melting, degrading snowpack. It looked quite lovely, but for April 6, a bit of a backsliding....

It wasn't  meant to last, however. While yesterday the ambient temperature was wintry, today it's become far more moderate, and as the temperature rose through the morning the newfallen snow melted, revealing once again the sooty aspect of snow being transformed from monochromatic white to a shrinking blanket revealing the presence of plenty of grey and black particulate matter,

Out for our afternoon walk along the forest trails yesterday it was cold and windy but the even more frigid temperature of the day before had ameliorated and traction on the trails was much improved. The sight of snow blanketing the landscape in the ravine is slowly being replaced with growing patches of bare ground on the hillsides where the power of the warming sun has influenced snow melting, though where we have trodden on the snow what lies underneath it is pure, thick ice which will take a bit longer to disappear.

The integrity of the snowpack has been breached, though. In some places it has become mealy, in others it just looks messy, full of detritus and quite unappealing. In other areas yet, where warm spells melted snow leaving puddles of meltwater, those puddles froze over again leaving a surface of smooth, sheer ice to be avoided. Time for it all to go.

Jackie and Jillie don't mind all the newly-revealed fallen twigs and branches on the shrinking snowpack, stopping now and again to bite off pieces of detritus to chew them. No amount of objections on our part serve to convince them it's not the best thing for them to do. Most dogs seem to find the prospect of chewing wood attractive for some reason.

And for some reason one of the raccoons, the younger, smaller of the two that regularly come around, decided to visit us again this morning. Perhaps forgetting that it's meant to be a nocturnal creature, but finding the prospect of bread cubes as an alternative to the dog kibble my husband puts out for them, alluring. So there he was, delicately picking up cubed, toasted, buttered bagels left over from our own breakfast in his cleverly prehensile 'hands', turning each cube over, popping it into his mouth and chewing, chewing, chewing...