The Upper Valley experienced an ice storm that hit Sunday night March 6. Our yard and driveway were hit quite hard. The ice is finally melting today, Friday, and the trees that haven’t snapped in two are slowly standing upright again. There will be a lot of cleanup work to do this spring and summer.
We lost power early Monday morning and it didn’t return until 6 pm. Even then we fared better than some. Our first look at our side yard and driveway revealed this depressing scene. During the week the large tree with the bird house lost many more branches as well as the birdhouse.
Monday evening, somewhat before the power returned, the sunset caused the ice on the hills of NH and VT to glow. As you can probably tell, it was snowing when I took this photo which added to the “charm” of the scene. 
There was no way I was going to make my Tuesday morning appointment in Lebanon without help. I couldn’t have made it down our driveway with anything smaller than a tank. There were branches overhanging from both sides and perhaps 8 trees down across the driveway. Just walking down it was a real challenge. Fortunately a friend cheerfully came to my rescue meeting me down on King Road. When he returned me to the bottom of our driveway shortly before noon, Jann was there to meet me. Here is Jann carrying the newspaper back up our driveway.
Fortunately our “plow guy” had arrived with three helpers, four chainsaws, and, a bit later, a front end loader/backhoe to push the branches and cutup trees into the woods a bit. Here are two of his crew attacking our driveway.
And here are two more photos of the driveway after the overhanging branches and downed trees had been cut.
Wednesday broke sunny then clouded up. I photographed the birds and squirrels in our yard. You can see some of these photos in the earlier blog below. I did a short xc-ski on the neighboring Morton Farm being careful not to enter the woods as “widow makers” were crashing down from time to time. Thursday was still cold and now the fog rolled in and enveloped the yard. Here is Jann heading down to get our newspaper.
Please scroll down and view the slide show of photos of the ice storm of 2011. Below the slide show is an image you can click to get to a version that you can zoom into and pan around and see the devastation in detail.
Please click the image below to get to a version you can explore in detail.
