Hello one and all!
Well, the weather here in Yorkshire has provided me with work once again. It has been snowing for a couple of weeks now, it stopped in the middle and started melting, but then on Wednesday (The 6th February 2013) it all kicked off again. So I hooked up the gritter and off I went again!
My dear little tractor, a Kubota M6040 (15/1/13)
The snow started around the 15th January 2013, and for the first week or two it was pretty heavy. One of the farmers on Falcon Farm, who lives outside, was unable to get into Botton, so I was in charge of the farm for a while.
The Falcon Farm Yard (16/1/13)
Beautiful sky! (16/1/13)
On the night of the 25th/26th Jan the wind picked up, and blew all the snow into drifts, and some of them were quite impressive!
1 meter drifts up by the wood work shop (26/1/13)
Big piles of snow at the sides of the road, picked up by the snow ploughs and later with a JCB digger. (26/1/13)
Big drift in our back garden (26/1/13)
…It wasn't;t that big…
On the Monday (28th Jan) one of my villagers and I went into Guisbrough to the vets. We had to pick up some medicine for two of our pigs which had mites. We thought we should go the safer way, through Danby, then up through the Castleton Moor Road, which we assumed would be clear. We had a 4x4 (Subaru Impreza) and so we figured it’d be fine!
The drifts started to get bigger and bigger, and where the ploughs and diggers had been the walls started to be built up. Eventually we saw a digger parked at the side of the road, with a guy talking to another guy by it, so I asked them if the road was alright ahead, their answer was a thumbs up, so I drove on. A short while later, around a bend, was a vertical wall, 10ft high, of snow, all around… That is the last time I’m trusting a digger driver to tell me if the road is clear…
We turned around and went via Danby in the end, and that road was only just open, but we made it to the vets!
