We got maybe an inch of snow in the night. High wind warnings through tomorrow til noon. Could be gusts up to 70 mph. We have lots of trees around our house and this wind, and those trees are making Mr. FH nervous. Today I will call tree trimmers to come and take a look at what can be done. They are Golden Willows to the west, and they are old. We don't have any idea of the root system of Golden Willows. We get most of the wind from the NW. We have Blue Spruce and Ponderosa trees to the north and east, plus other trees like quaking asps (my favorite) and cottonwoods. We lived where there weren't many trees for so long it's been nice having them, but we sure don't want them to fall on the house. I belong to a local CattleWomen's group here and when an older lady called to let me know of the April meeting, we talked about the wind. She said "the wind never used to blow here." That's what we remember, except when there was a blizzard, we didn't have wind like this.
Anyway, according to the local weather, we could get up to 12" of snow starting on Sunday and run through Wednesday morning. It will be cold too. This could mean a bad spring storm. We've been through those before when we ranched here in the 60's and 70's. We suffered a Good Friday Storm in 1973 that killed a lot of livestock. We found some of the neighbors sheep that had blown under. We looked for steam coming out of a drift and started shovelling the sheep out. It blew so hard, 98 mph winds with record snow that it blew the cracks of barns and sheds so full of wind-driven snow that what was inside died from lack of oxygen. A lady sheep rancher near Gillette had sheep in a shed that had just been sheared, or was just going to be sheared (not sure which) and the shed plugged up with snow and they all died. There were layers of dead sheep, and the ones on the bottom were cooked from the heat of those on the layers above. It was a 3 day KILLER storm, the worse we had ever experienced. Friends lost 800 head of sheep. There are a lot more stories of what on during that time, it was awful. Then there was a bad spring storm in 1984, they said was worse than the one in 1973 but we were in Montana at that time. I know it killed all the birds and again, a lot of livestock. Blew the hair off the cattle, even.