Mother nature may be winning

 Today my younger son, Leonardo, and I went to assess the damage at the oasis in my older son's 4X4 pickup. 

Snake Road 

Oasis in sight

I was unprepared for the damage to the trees. Many of them were flattened by the weight of the snow and some smaller trees were snapped in half. Almost all lost limbs, large and small.

Most bushes were still prone under the weight of snow on them. Here Lee is trying to remove snow from the limbs of this Chisos Rosewood hoping the limbs would straighten out, but they didn't. I'll have to prune those blocking the walkways.

While he did some plumbing repairs at the house I gathered and pruned broken limbs. We also discovered that of the three rain catchment tanks at the house, only one was catching melting snow. We finally got the other two working but most of the snow on the roofs had already been lost. With his last energy he shoveled some snow onto the house roof so it would melt and fill the tank. That's an unforeseen advantage of having an earth-sheltered house. The roof is at ground level.