Back yard view at 16F degrees

So our first plowable snow event came through Wednesday with a snowfall of ten inches (season total to fifteen) followed immediately by a quarter inch of rain, twenty hours of moderate, above-freezing temperatures, followed by the big chill with lows to sixteen (did I mention the 20 mph winds?). This is the worst kind of combination: snow-to-rain-to-cold. The yard gets torn up into mud then freezes to solid.

The light brown foreground you see in image-1 is frozen and churned yard formerly known as mud; the structure in the background is the cover to the composted-dirt pile; the second image is a large section of tree trunk lying on the ground. The patterns from the knots got my attention. The diameter of this trunk is almost three feet.