Beaver Lodge

Just occasionally you get a day or two in the spring/winter when you can actually walk around on top of the snow without sinking in.  The temperature needs to be swinging between a few degrees above and below freezing. The snow warms up, becomes wet, and then freezes.  The ideal weather for this is a clear sky giving warm days and freezing nights.
Today was such a day!  We set off on the road as usual but after a little experimentation we found we could wander at will across the snow fields.
So we took a walk down to the river and the three beaver dams. This summer the beavers built a new dam, deepening the river by about a meter and a half and creating a new pool. This gave them an ideal site for a new lodge, with water deep enough that their underwater entrance was sure to be ice free so they could swim in and out without problems.
In one summer they built a meter-and-a-half high dam and this three meter high lodge so the saying "Busy as a beaver" seems very accurate.
I hope the farmer leaves them alone as they are only flooding a small bit of his land but farmers are very precious about their land so we'll have to see.