Yesterday, we woke up to low hanging clouds, brisk wind (gusts up to 45 mph), and rain.

And this morning, the mountain was covered in snow!  We're still getting some snow flurries now.

We have a little bit of news of happenings from Tuesday.  At 8, we met John at the lab at gathered up supplies for tending the weather station.  We hiked up a little hill to the weather station, which is a small white box of a building with all sorts of instruments sticking off the top.  The procedure took about 2.5 hours and included collecting a bucket full of last week's precipitation.  Thayer and I will be alternating weeks with John throughout the winter, and it will be quite an adventure once more snow starts piling in.

[T- it's kind of fun; there's lots of writing down things and looking at instruments.  I'm sure the charm will wear off as the novelty does, but it's kinda cool that we're one of the few places that maintains these weather stations during the winter too.  Apparently most of them close down with the snow]

So we got back to Gates cabin around 10:30 and had breakfast and read, enjoying the nice weather.  Around 2 pm, I was looking out the bedroom window when I noticed a few cows on RMBL property across the street.  I informed Thayer, and we started getting ready to head down to chase them out.  I was filling a glass of water when . . . blurb blurb spurt . . . our water shut off.  With further impetus to head down the hill, we laced up our shoes and headed down.  Billy was already in the midst of trying to shoo the 4 cows and we joined him.  It wasn't nearly as bad as last time and was over relatively quickly.  When we told billy about the water not working, he walked us over to the pump house.  For some reason, the pump had gone off, and a manual reset started it working just fine.  Unfortunately, since our cabin is up on a hill, if the pump goes off, the water drains away from us.  Our water has been working fine since then, so it doesn't seem like anything serious happened (a pipe leak, out of water, or broken pump).