Trail blazing for the visitors

On Saturday we get our visitors from England and we snowshoed to this viewpoint and back to create a good trail for the visitors to follow easily.
Jan was a little ahead of me as she left the garden so she had the excitement of being the first to find lynx tracks across the corner of our garden and then into the forest along our snowshoe track. I've put in an extra of the tracks, with a glove to give a little scale. In another part of the garden there was a track from a domestic cat. Very like the lynx track but about one tenth the size!
The snow has been soggy but then frozen so it's fairly hard. On top of that is a sprinkling of new snow, which makes it perfect for creating good tracks. We can see where the squirrels have dashed across the snow, some perfect hare tracks, those exciting lynx tracks, tiny mouse tracks, and big elk tracks. Foxes have left their special winding around the place tracks. Bird tracks where the larger birds, jays and especially magpies have marched across the snow for metres and metres. I didn't see any roe deer tracks but the last time the lynx was around the roe deer disappeared so maybe that's why there are no tracks for that very common deer just now.
Things went wrong today - Rose's car didn't start (fixed), the Red House wouldn't unlock (fixed), there's a mouse in the cellar (trap laid), and wet snow had fallen from the roof and frozen hard, blocking the way into the barn. That's fixed too. The bird feeders were nearly empty after our week away, but now they are full again. The child seats needed a clean up and it  turned out to be tricky getting the covers off to wash them. I hope we can get them all back together again!
Despite all these jobs and problems it was a good day, partly because everything got fixed and partly because it was so pleasant to be outside. Warm in the sun but hard frosty snow on the ground, and no wind.
A very satisfying day!