2011: A year of weird weather
By Michael Johnson, Editor
The beginning of 2011 was a frightful one as snow covered an already wet state. The result was a cold and wet spring and summer. What surprised the skeptics was that most everything turns out in the end. As we enter year 2012 with no snow, we look back at the weather and how it affected us in 2011. For the outdoors man or woman who spent anytime outdoors over the past year you’ve likely seen a black and white difference from Jan. 2011 to Jan. 2012. Hunting: For those who wandered out pheasant hunting in the fall of 2010, the job required walking through waist-deep snow in your pac boots. The most recent fall saw snow for a couple weeks that would have barely made it necessary to upgrade to tennis shoes. The difference is the start of something beautiful for hunters of big game and upland game. Dan Halstead, wildlife resource management supervisor out of Riverdale, said that North Dakota has gone through basically three very tough winters and the big game such as whitetail deer and upland game like pheasants are showing the pain. “By last spring time we figured out that we actually lost a lot of deer up until May,” Halstead said. “The deer almost made it through the winter but the spring was a tough one.” Reports of deer disappearing from the landscape were common. For a while they thought that the deer might have just migrated to find better food and shelter, but when they never came back in the summer and fall, it was clear the cold and snow had done their worst.
