We got snow! Wow!
Okay, maybe not wow. But some people seem to be pretty excited about it.I guess if your a skier or don’t have to deal with it all day long, or a kid, but then I repeat myself…, you might get excited about snow. I don’t mind it. What we have won’t stick around too long and it will hep settle the dust. It will soften up the grass my cows are grazing. It makes every thing pretty again.
If I was feeding hay with a team, and could use a bobsled to do so, I probably would like it better. I really enjoyed feeding with a bobsled. The way it just slipped so easily over the snow and so quiet! All you heard was the soften clip clop of the horses feet and the sleigh bells ringing. ( I always had sleigh bells. An old rancher wrote one time, just the sound of them helped warm the temps up 10 or 20 degrees and I found out he was right!)
Of course, where I live, we seldom got to use a bobsled much. Too windy. It usually blew the snow into drifts and bare on the flats… so you seldom had good enough snow to pull a sled, every where you needed to go. I do remember one winter that was pretty snowy, cold and tough. I fed with a bobsled every day for 90 days. Seems like winter started at Thanksgiving with lots of snow and wind and kept it up all winter until mid April. ( As I wrote that last line I see it came up as MUD April… yeah, pretty much!)
I miss feeding with a team. Sure these tractors and pickups have cabs and heaters, but when you were young, you never noticed the cold so much and you just put on enough layers that it din’t bother as much. And I only had to drive about a mile, at the farthest to get to the hay stacks and cattle. The only place I couldn’t get warm or protect were my cheek bones. Can’t even get whiskers to grow on there…always wished I had one of them helmets like the Astronauts used.. but then my team probably would have run off from fear!
Another advantage to a team, was in the spring I was in awful good shape. At first from pitching hay and even after I started feeding big round bales and made a bale wagon. I still had to get off and on the wagon to load each bale and run two winches. It helped to keep you warm. My only complaint was I needed suspenders in the spring as my pants were pretty loose fitting, especially after I switched from long handles to brief underwear!
Well, I suppose by the time you read this, most of this snow will be gone. But South Dakota being South Dakota, I am betting there will be more before May 15th!
Keep your snow shovel handy!
Dennisranch 
It’s been an odd winter here. I’m calling it the winter that wasn’t. No snow to speak of, what little we got disappeared within a couple of days. The sap was running in the willow trees in late November and my magnolia bush has had buds on it since about that time too. We go from bare muddy ground to frozen muddy ground and back to thawed muddy ground within days of each other.
Maybe the snow will hit us in March.
Yes, it has been different, but a good different, around here!