The Calm After The Storm

The photo at left was taken just after 5PM today after some 30+ hours of rain, sleet, and finally a dusting of snow. There is a sun! That’s the Stud Barn in the background: no alpacas are visible because they too are cowering inside away from the ice.

I would love to tell you that we made it through the storm unscathed but as it turned out about an hour after my posting from earlier today a 2′ maple tree (that’s the diameter, not the height) fell across the road heading to the top of the farm and took out the utility lines that service the Arena. Ice is more powerful than one might believe! Though the Arena, like all of the buildings here at CCNF, has a generator to deal with such circumstances we were left with the farm tractor and the two utility vehicles (a Kubota and a Toolcat) trapped on the uphill side of a live downed power line. Needless to say the cleanup crew got their exercise this morning huffing it up and down the mountainside. Our power company says that they will hopefully get to us later today or this evening though one barn with alpacas gets put low on the priority list (and rightly so) when there are entire residential neighborhoods still without power.