Here in Long Island, it has been a mild winter, particularly in comparison to a year ago.   Despite the mild weather, the one time that it snowed was about 12 hours before the contest, leaving about five inches of snow and a covering of sleet afterwards.   This continues the trend for the past few years for my QRP portable effort where there has always been snow on the ground.   Despite this, I went out and did my usual setup from a hill located in central Suffolk County (FN30).  Conditions at the start of the contest seem decent and I spotted a narrow Sporadic-E opening into grid EM36 on Six Meters where I worked two of three stations that I heard.  Eventually, I was able to work a few others via Sporadic-E, including K5QE in EM31.   Shortly after working K5QE, I heard VO1KVT coming in from the opposite direction and I swung the beam to work him.   The next morning saw very poor conditions on all of the bands.  Line-of-sight was limited to FN30, FN31 and FN20 on the lower four bands that I had.  By noontime, there was practically nothing heard.  Then about 2 pm, I heard some very strong signals coming in from Florida on Six Meters.  I managed to work KN4Y on CW from EM70 and AC4TO on SSB from EM70.  Then came the biggest suprise of the contest.  I heard K1TOL from FN44 coming in good on SSB.  When I swung the beam around, his signal dropped down and I realized that he was coming in via backscatter off of the Sporadic-E formation that was causing the opening to Florida.  I called Lefty via CW and got him in the log.  He told me after the contest that he was hearing many W1 and W2 stations coming in by backscatter but many turned there beam towards him, instead of south off of the backscatter, and it was hard for him to work them.   Although, I did not have a big score, the narrow Sporadic-E openings on both days, plus the backscatter QSO made it a very memorable contest.