Well, it's not like it's been a fine spring so far - the cold went on and on, slowly softening to merely being cool which melted very little of our way-too-much snow. Environment Canada had predicted a long, cool spring and unfortunately they got that one right.
Next up was the eventual melt - and what we all knew was going to happen. The ground being still saturated with all the rain we got last year and covered with extreme amounts of this winter's snow. When Mother Nature finally did turn up the heat, there was water running everywhere. In this neck of the woods every spring has runoff. The creeks all fill and run for maybe a week - two if there was a lot of snow, or it rains during the melt, but this year they have been running - no, make that gushing - for almost a month now. Roads washed out, bridges were plugged, yards and fields were flooded, people had to deal with water in their basements. It was crazy
Looking back, those were the good times. Last weekend along came the worst blizzard of the winter - maybe even quite a few winters - and dumped two inches of rain on us before the unwelcome moisture turned to snow and carried on falling for the next 24 hours. The temperatures weren't so bad but the wind was unreal; steady at 60 kph and gusting to 90. Neighbours lost the roof to their brand new shed, bins tipped over and rolled around in the wind, and if you have a shingling business, you could be busy here all summer. The toll was pretty high for cattle producers too - newborn calves can't take that kind of treatment. I don't know how many died over the weekend. We lost two but I have heard that one herd lost 40 - not nice, not nice at all.
Being as it was May by this time, Mother Nature lost no time turning the thermostat up. By Tuesday it was 18 degrees again. If we thought we had water problems before, we learned that we hadn't seen anything yet. What is normally a small pond in a regular spring was a very large one this April, and now is a small lake with waterfalls running into and out of it. And there are many many many such lakes per quarter section. Seeding is a distant dream and will be an exercise in exasperation when they finally do get out on the land. The plantable acres will be a fraction of normal and very difficult to get to. I don't know how many times Glen and I have thanked our lucky stars that we only have pasture land any more!
I took a walk up the road tonight after I got home from work - the two places where water was running over the road (within a mile and a half) are now stopped, but the road will need fixing and a new culvert put in one place. I should ask the RM administrator how many places they have like this - my guess that they don't have too many miles that don't have this kind of trouble. They have even had to cut some roads in places to save property; just three miles east of here they cut through in two places to save six or seven bins full of grain. It's been a spring for the record books ... and the weatherman says that there is more rain on its way tonight.
Today I heard that Environment Canada is predicting that June, July, and August are all going to be hotter than usual. On the one hand, we all feel that we are due something good from them, but on the other hand heat has a habit of brewing up storms on the prairies - after seeing the damage in the States caused by tornados, I'm not sure that's a good thing either.
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