The weeks news. Or, Murphy’s law in full effect
It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven.
Crazy weather, snowmobile troubles, and a broken foot, have kept me too busy to keep up on my postings of late.
The weather has been spring-like which is odd for January, where we normally have colder temperatures and lots of snow to make travel to our pickup an easy trip. That hasn’t been the case this winter. These unseasonably warm temperatures have caused us no end of trouble, since we have had nothing but freezing rain, or a rain/snow mix, leaving the first half of the road a sheet of ice that nothing can cross. Getting in supplies, such as much needed drinking water, food, and fuel, has been extremely difficult. Once or twice, snow has fallen with just enough accumulation to run a snowmobile on, and we have scrambled to get in what we could before the snow turned to rain, washing the road clean down to the ice once again.
Just prior to the troubles with the weather, we began having trouble with our snowmobile. The trouble started when it blew a clutch, leaving us without any means of transportation off the mountain other than our feet until we could get and install a new clutch. This resulted in the machine sitting off to the side of the trail for nearly a week before we could get to Coeur d’Alene for the new clutch. Once the new clutch was replaced, I discovered that somehow all the gas that had been in the tank when the machine broke-down was gone. Obviously, there was a leak somewhere in the system. After bringing more fuel to the snowmobile, I was still unable to get the machine to run causing me to suspect that moisture had gotten into and frozen in the carburetors. This required me to remove the carburetors and bring them home to thaw out. After replacing the carburetors in the snowmobile, we were finally able to get the machine home. Unfortunately, this was not the end of our troubles with the machine. I wound up removing the carburetors a couple more times, adjusting the clutches to align properly, replacing the choke cable, replacing the belt, repairing damaged fuel lines, and replacing bad sparkplugs, before finally having the machine in reliable running order.
During the troubles with my machine, my son’s machine broke the drive chain, and because of its age and size, finding parts, or even getting it home before spring, has been a concern. Right now, it’s sitting off on a side road waiting for dry roads, and my pickup, to tow it home. This, of course, won’t happen until sometime in May. Also, when his machine broke down, my son somehow managed to get his foot caught between the bogey wheels and the track on the machine, running over his foot and breaking a couple bones. He is still healing.
We were able to acquire three more machines. My son found the first two machines online and spent time working on them at our local shop where they were gracious enough to let him keep them as well as allow him to borrow the tools he needed to accomplish the work. He was able to get the smaller of the two machines running and, with the help of a friend, got it to our road and finally home. The larger of the machines is still in town at the local shop. After spending many hours trying to figure out what was wrong with it, my son finally handed it over to the shop and asked them to take a look at it. The third machine is much like the machine we already have and I found it when I contacted a local individual about parts for our machine. This person has a large quantity of parts from defunct Phazer snowmobiles, and while I was there picking up a couple parts for our Phazer, I discovered he had a running Phazer that he was willing to part with. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to get either of these two machines home due to the road conditions on our mountain.
Our little generator also decided to quit working, leaving us to have to run our big one. The big one uses far more fuel than the little one does; a gallon runs the little one eight hours, compared to the big one, which uses five gallons in the same amount of time. Fortunately, the little one was under warranty and I currently have the replacement generator sitting in our pickup. However, I have no way to haul it home without the struggle of hauling it uphill and over ice, for over a mile. We are trying to come up with a way to bring it up here so we can stop using the large generator and save fuel.
For the time being, we can get down the mountain about halfway before we have to hike. This leaves the lovely wife hiking down before work and up after, though, something she doesn’t relish doing, but has no choice. She is worn out by the time she makes it home and we pretty much fall into bed early and sleep straight through until morning.
I am really hoping for snow again in the coming week, as I would like to get our “new” machines up here; though, the way this winter is shaping up, I doubt we will see any major snowfall until next month. Until then, we will continue to struggle to bring in supplies, and hope for the best. That’s life off grid on a mountain.
Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.
