More About Snow. Part II: The Great Whiteness.

It’s not really the whiteness, it’s more that it’s February and the end isn’t in sight. In Britain the rain has washed last week’s snow away whereas here the skiing season is getting into full swing.

You can see at the bottom of the gate below that we’ve got about two feet (60cm) of snow. It’s not quite deep enough to go over the top of my knee-length wellingtons.

Recently, I’ve been taking the dogs down the hill

and on to the lake.

It had just finished snowing yesterday when we went down there.  Hardly anybody was on the lake except for the person you can just see in the distance, behind a kick-sledge.  He always seems to be there .

This is the amaryllis in the kitchen. Dyveke buys one every year and I love it. Even though it doesn’t quite fit with the others, I didn’t want the picture to go to waste.

Oh, and here’s the snow-blowing tractor.

Foggy Top.

As well as being a so-called snow hole – there’s often tons of snow here when it’s all melted down in Oslo – up where we live it’s often foggy, especially in the morning. Roll the three kilometres down the hill to the fjord and it’s clear with sharp sunlight. Sometimes down there there’s what appears to be steam coming off the fjord but there’s no overhead cloud except for the one wrapping our hill.  Our fog clears round about lunchtime, usually. Here is what happened yesterday.

There was a glimmer of sun when we started out from the house.

After a quarter of an hour’s walking I could see the sun – sort of.

And then the fog started rolling back off the lake.

It happened within a couple of minutes.

It was still difficult to see the cliff behind our house.

When that cleared, the sky was also revealed.  There’s our house at the bottom right, in the shadows.

Finally, from the garden, through the trees, I could see the horse farm on the far side of the lake.