Late Season Mother Nature

As any WNYer will tell you, early or late season snowfall can have a devastating effect on everything it touches. This is mostly due to the wetness, and thus, heaviness of the snow. The late winter of 2018 was no different.

The Center has over 4 miles of trails that we actively maintain (and more that we do not). This year will take a lot of cleanup as seen from the pictures. These were taken on the first truly beautiful spring day of 2018, which did not arrive until April 22nd:

As you can see above, you have numerous different cleanup situations. You have the white pine branches to remove (white pine is highly susceptible to breakage under the wet snow), numerous small branches to bend down and throw off the trails, whole trees that are leaning over causing "widow maker" issues, tops of large trees that take a lot of time to cut up, and then your various "let's just throw every little tree onto the trail for you" situations.

Not only comes the arduous trail cleanup work after a snow like this, but you also end up losing beautiful old trees

The trail maintenance takes many hours of clean up, but once it gets done, then you have this:

Ahhhh, a nice clear and safe trail to hike.

Now, I digress...doing this type of work, while out in the beautiful nature scene, is actually not half bad. Sure it can get old fast, but then you can take a break and find the things that you are truly out there to see. Like...

That's the stuff!

Now I leave you with the gorgeous sounds of our springtime amphibians: