Mietzke's POST Holden Adventure

It's been a zoo for the last couple of weeks. The weather has been warm and rainy, everything is melting and icy.

On New Year's Eve we were going to have a bonfire, well the burn pile was huge and under three feet of snow. We tried to separate the pile into two but it wasn't having it. I started the fire at seven, hoping that it would be nice and big by ten, when it was on the schedule. I went back out at ten and it was still just barely burning. We came back to the village and went to one of the parties; at about twelve thirty we walked back up to our chalet, and could see a glow through the trees. At about one thirty I looked out the living room window and could see flames over the trees. I went back out to the fire and it was spectacular! It was burning so hot that it was vaporizing the snow. At one point it burned under the snow and came out of a hole at the end of the pile. I watched it until five in the morning, I don't think I would have stayed out that long if I had had my watch on but it was really amazing to see. I managed to get it to burn from the center of the pile to the west and not the east, by shoveling the snow off of the first few feet to the west. It just took off that way when it was still smallish and kept going. In the time that I was watching it, it went twenty five feet to the west and only three or four to the east.

Last Monday (a week ago today) the J-termers came in there are only thirty of them this year. They're a great bunch; so far they seem very earnest and energetic. A big change from last years group, not that they were bad, it just feels like this group immediately became part of the village and last year never quite did.

Tuesday we had a plow crew down working on the road, we knew the avalanche danger was going to be pretty extreme once it started raining, so we were trying to get the crew back before the rain really started, but they kept running into problems, and when they finally got back to the narrows on their way back there was a big avalanche across the road so they had to spend the night in the A-frame at the lake. They and another crew from the village worked all morning to clear the road, and when we finally got it clear there were only four people coming into the village, all staff. Once it started raining Tuesday it didn't stop until early Thursday morning. Then it dropped into the twenties in Friday and Saturday nights and made a fine mess of everything. I understand that the road is in pretty good shape once you leave the village, but in the village it's a solid sheet of ice with melt water on top.