Above is Long Ridge Deer Camp as you read this. But don't get the wrong idea! Today it will get to nearly forty degrees, and we will lose a lot of this snow. The sheep were sheared yesterday, and we are counting on low temperatures of 28 degrees. T-shirt weather!

Today at Deer Camp it was forty degrees in the sun at 1 PM! Imagine that...I spent the afternoon snowmobiling and packing trails before I put the sleds back inside our trailer. Typically in the winter, I load snow into a bay in the machinery barn, pack it with the tractor, and this is where the winter machines you see above will park. Fire them up, and go. But by this time of the year if we get a warm spell like this week, the snow starts to melt and they'd be sitting on dirt if not moved. In the morning now, we can walk the dogs on the trails through the fields and woods, and not break through. They are hard as cement in the morning. But by 1 PM, they start to get soft and hard to walk on. The picture you see above is a trip we took up to the Far Ridge, about a mile from Deer Camp. Lots of snow up there, but even in the near field this evening there was 21 inches of snow waiting to melt. Seems strange since this was a low snowfall winter...we never even went on a real snowmobile trip because of the scarcity of snow on the trails.

Since this blog is primarily about deer hunting, I will say that the winter has been particularly kind to the Whitetails. They are used to surviving way more snow and cold than they were exposed to this winter and they are looking pretty good. The coldest temperature at the house over winter was 7 degrees below zero, way warmer than most winters. If we don't get one of those typical late March blizzards that dump another twenty inches, the deer will be fine.

Deer Camp is still packed in with snow so not much in the way of projects going on, but I have assembled another twenty foot ladder stand, and a hanger for placement next summer.

Still working on the Winchesters to see what they can improve to for group, and today I used a trigger pull gauge I borrowed from the PD armory to measure trigger pull. The wood stocked Featherweight you saw in the previous blog pulled about 7 pounds! No wonder it won't group better than 1 3/4! The Winlite 70 pulled at 4 3/4 pounds. Funny, because I couldn't feel much difference between them, Not terrible, but I will get the needed wrenches and adjust both to about three pounds..

Above is my snowmobile in front of Deer Camp. This is a short lived sight this time of year, though in New Hampshire, ANY time in March you can get 20 inches of snow and -5 degrees. The deer don't like that, and neither do we!

This is looking out of Deer Camp doorway, and the snowbank you see is what had slid off the roof. Today I rode my Ribicon out on the snowmobile trails, and when I strayed off, I bogged helplessly down. Bottomed out, but within walking distance of the machinery barm. Jumped on a second one and hauled mine out. I measured the snowpack there and it was nineteen iches. It's going fast though!