Lake Effect Howl

Posted On December 3, 2024

Welcome to North Country Winter

Where Great Lake Winds Growl

Where Hardy Souls Steel Themselves

For Snow Season’s Prowl

Praying Mother Nature Will not Bury Them Deep

Beneath Lake Effect’s Howl

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Welcome to 2024’s rendition of North Country Winter. The first lake effect storm of the season blew in just after Thanksgiving. The professional north country weather prognosticators started painting a gloom and doom portrait about a week out. Snow totals of upwards of five feet were projected over the weekend along the paths of the heaviest lake effect bands.

My son RJ and I had plans for our annual post-Thanksgiving father/son Southern Tier deer hunting trip with our friend Chuck on his land near Elmira. However, the weather prognosis worsened by the hour, with the pair of predicted lake effect bullseyes forming off Ontario’s eastern shore along the Tug Hill Plateau first turning dark red, then black.

Discretion being the better part of valor, and both of us having braved that whiteout lake effect trip along Interstate 81 too many times to count, we altered our plans. RJ beat feet home late Thursday evening after thanksgiving dinner, hoping to get south of the storm’s reach ahead of the snow. I cancelled my plans to hunt altogether, focusing my efforts instead on pre-storm prep.

I was expecting to awake Friday morning to a healthy blanket of snow. Instead, I was greeted by not much more than an overnight dusting, with a blue-sky horizon at sunrise. I put my north woods boy’s nose to the air and thought “This storm isn’t coming together quite as expected.” I quick checked the local weather and sure enough, the lake effect bullseye bands had retreated from black to back to red and it looked to me like the brunt of Lake Ontario’s snow path had shifted just a bit further south and east on “The Tug”. I made a snap decision at that point. “Time to go hunting.”

I called RJ and my wife (who was already out Black Friday shopping), informed them of my last-minute plan change, threw my hunting gear in my truck and got on the road shortly after 9am. RJ and I planned to hunt that afternoon. Our goal was to finish the season with three or four more does worth of venison for the freezer.

I ran into some lake effect snow on Interstate 81 shortly after I left Watertown. Visibility was greatly reduced, and the roads were slick with fresh snow. Traffic crawled along in a line at 20-30 MPH for a while. Some folks just don’t know how to navigate winter. Flashing red NYS Trooper Car lights marked where several cars had gone off the road. From my perspective, as far as lake effect snow goes, the snow we were driving through barely blipped the radar. by the time I worked my way south of Sandy Creek the snow ended and from there on I had clear sailing.

We met at Chuck’s shop as planned. RJ, Chuck’s niece Katie and I set out for the weekend’s first hunt Friday afternoon. I was in an elevated enclosed platform blind called “The Redneck” overlooking a sloping linear food plot running beneath a powerline. RJ was a couple of fields over in an enclosed haybale ground blind. Katie was on the next hill in another elevated enclosed blind nicknamed “The Tower”.

I almost immediately after I got set up and oriented, two young bucks stepped out. However, with my buck tag already filled, they weren’t my target. I watched them for a while as I practiced stealthily opening and closing my various shot windows. Not long after that pair disappeared into the brush, a nice mature eight-point buck and a fawn stepped out into my sightline, grazing in the food plot field below me to my left, about sixty yards out.

A few moments later, three does joined them. Now I had five deer grazing the field below me to my left. I slowly opened my left center shooting window and put my range finder on the biggest of the three does, scoping. I then set my bipod in place and zeroed in on my target with my .308 bolt action rifle. I sat patiently waiting for my target doe to turn and give me a good broadside shot as she grazed alongside the other two does, the fawn, and that big eight-point buck.

Slowly, she turned to her right, head down, grazing, just over forty-five yards out, until she was broadside. I exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger.

“BAM!!”

The doe dropped dead right there. The other deer cleared the field as I called RJ.

“Doe Down.”

Shortly after that, Rj shot and hit a doe. His doe didn’t go down right away, but he was confident he had made a good shot, so I stayed put, reloaded, waiting to put one more doe down and finish our season that afternoon.

Not long thereafter, a group of four or five does stepped out and began grazing the field near where my first doe went down. I opened the same center left side shooting window I had used before, set up my bipod, zeroed in my scope, waiting for doe number two to turn broadside.

“BAM!”

Now I had two does down, lying not ten yards from each in the field below me. I was out of tags. My season was over. A few minutes after that, right around sunset, I heard Katie shoot. She dropped a big doe. Now we were all done. All that was left was to retrieve, field dress and tag our doe harvest and get them into our new “Koolabuck” cold storage awaiting a trip to the processor.

Unfortunately, RJ’s doe somehow managed to escape our tracking efforts, even after we went back the next morning and picked up her blood trail. An unfortunate reality of hunting that we all work hard to avoid. Despite our best efforts, it still happens occasionally.

Still, with three more does in the freezer, by 10 am Saturday morning, RJ called off the search. We agreed that our season was over. I called my wife Robin. It was snowing in Watertown. It appeared my window of opportunity was rather rapidly closing. I packed and loaded gear quickly to get home ahead of what was now predicted to be a potent shifting lake effect snow band.

I drove beneath clear blue skies most of the way home. there was no visible snow on the ground south of Pulaski. The first snow I encountered was near exit 41, up by Adams. By the time I got to Adams Center, I was in a complete whiteout. I crawled along in near zero visibility until I got to exit 45, Arsenal Street, Watertown, which was where I was getting off. There I met blue skies and clear travels again. That intense lake effect band was only four exits long.

We didn’t have more than 3-4 inches of snow on the ground at our house. I fell asleep Saturday night feeling good about my decision to do my own weather read and go hunt with my son. If I had listened to the weather forecasters, I’d have stayed mired at home and missed out on everything. It at that point appeared that we had escaped the brunt of the storm.

Sunday morning, I awoke to what looked out the window like several fresh inches of snow. Once I stepped outside, however, I realized that overnight we had gotten something closer to a foot of new snow. The bottom layer was slush, as Thanksgiving’s ground was not frozen. I fired up my snowblower as the lake effect snow band settled back in overhead and started piling in rapidly.

I was about half an hour into my snowblowing routine when catastrophe struck. My auger throttle cable snapped. By that time we had over a foot of snow on the ground and were headed for two. I suddenly found myself in a world of hurt. Why do snowblowers always seem to break down at the worst times? It was Sunday morning, on a holiday weekend, no less. My wife Robin and I had no other options. We were quickly getting buried. Our only option at that point was to suck it up and start shoveling.

My wife and I shoveled all day Sunday, and well into the evening. At one point my neighbor Matt let me borrow his snowblower. I was able to clear much of the driveway with it but reached a point where piled snow and slush just proved too much. Fearful of damaging my neighbor’s machine, I returned it to him and determined we were best off finishing our driveway clearing effort by hand. In the meantime, it just kept on snowing.

We shoveled as much as we could manage Sunday night and prayed for a reprieve overnight before resuming our efforts Monday morning. First thing Monday, I called my snowblower dealer. They advised me they were booked solid, buried, and might not even be able to pick up my snowblower for repairs until the following week. Then, even once they had it, they informed me that they were so far behind on repairs it could be three weeks or more before I got it back.

Robin and I were both exhausted and sore. we agreed that we could not wait 3-4 weeks for repairs on our snowblower. We made some quick calls and found another dealer nearby locally, a John Deere dealer whose sales rep advised me on the phone that he had two machines left in stock.

I didn’t hesitate. I jumped in my truck and headed out. By the time I got to the John Deere dealership, the two machines their sales rep had told me they had in stock were gone. To put it politely, his manner was curt. He told me he had one machine left, a 30-inch Ariens Deluxe Series. The snowblower was a little bigger than any that I had ever had, but it had everything I was looking for, electric start, metal hand crank operated chute, heavy duty cables. It was a real machine. I never flinched. I pulled out my credit card and a few quick minutes later, I owned it.

Two quick grand poorer, I asked the sales rep. when they thy might be able to have it delivered. Again, in a starkly brusque “Can’t you see I’m busy, Pal?” manner, he informed me that their delivery vehicle was buried, they were behind, and I might not see my new snowblower until sometime the following week.

With a good deal of driveway still left to clear, an “Alberta Clipper” snowstorm on the way, two pair of already aching arms and shoulders, I ignored the sales rep’s (who was probably about the same age as my son) abrupt manner and said,

“I don’t know if it’s worth anything to you or not, but if you can find a way to get this machine to me by Friday, there’s a $100 bill waiting for your delivery driver, and another for you.”

He didn’t respond, and I thought no more of it. I stopped by the drug store to pick up my prescriptions on my way home, and while I was in line there, my cell phone buzzed.

“Mr. Monroe, this is Chris, from S&N partners. I just loaded your new snowblower on the trailer. I’m on my way to your house.”

He met me in my driveway not five minutes after I beat feet back home, gave me a quick rundown on my new snowblower and walked me through a test drive. It threw what was left of my driveway snow half a mile in five minutes. It even has handwarmers, and a headlight.

This machine is a beast!

It even has “the King of Snow” emblazoned right on it.

The moral of the story is this:

Money talks, bullshit walks and I’m back in business.

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Until Our Trails Cross Again:

ADKO