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	January 18th through 21st, 1996

We made it up late Thursday for what has become a regular Winter thing. This is the fifth year that we've had a bottle rocket war on the North end of Lake Lucerne and it was one of the coldest ones yet.

This is the first year we've used a formal fort building aid. The giant wall form is made from three 4x8 (1 inch thick) sheets of green treated plywood. One is cut in half to make the ends. The resulting wall is 8 feet long, 4 feet high, and 4 feet thick. That's a lot of snow. It took all of Friday to make the form and fill one wall.

It was cold on Saturday. There was some dispute whether the high temperature was 2°F or 4°F, not that there's much practical difference. We had one more wall to build and the other two guys had to start their entire structures.

The cold made for some hard fort building. The meager amount of snow did not help.

Drifts were mined. Their 3 inch slabs of white were sledded back to construction sites..

War time temperatures were somewhat lower than those we enjoyed during the day.

We had a total of close to 500 rockets divided between three forts.

The camera was set to automatically shoot 10 minute exposures at F1.4. It worked pretty well.

The camera was repositioned toward the end of the battle.

Nothing like giving a foe a little bit of light by blowing one up over their head.

After the war, some other stuff was fired off. All fear the might of the "Saturn Missile Battery"!

The great stick pickup and battle assessment started early Sunday and included some light flurries.

Most of the carbon scoring on our fort was the result of outgoing fire.

There was one "red stick whisker" embedded in the super thick walls.

Krispa's lump of a fort had a few more "red stick whiskers" scruffying it up. Not quite a beard's worth, but more than ours.

The backside of the Krispa lump was a bit more fort-like.

The third fort had a thinner wall and a smaller "fall back" position.

It also had some tasteful top ornamentation to go with a few close shots. One shot was blocked by the forehead (bonk!) of the fort's owner the night before.

Strange weather. We went from an ugly snow/rain/ice mix on Thursday (lovely traveling weather!) to a sub-zero war time temperature that made lighting fuses challenging. The mushroom soup at Duck's bar on Friday helped. Despite the weather, it was a great war that took some of the sting out of the Packer loss to the Cowboys last week. Except for the guy that got hit in the head, he's said to have felt an extra sting.<br><br><br>-Nemo likes his rocket war just a tad warmer.

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