The weeks news. A new year, Snowmobile trouble again, and old dogs
It’s been a quiet week up here on the mountain, my little slice of heaven in the great northwest.
It’s January, a new year, with most of the same issues as the last year, though we are hoping for a different ending as time goes on.
We’ve had some snow, though not as much as we would normally have this time of year, nor have we had the bitter cold that comes with January. We had around two feet of snow, before we got a hard rain that damped the snow down to around 16 inches and froze the trails so hard that I was able to drive a 4-wheeler all the way from the spring, a mile below us, into the driveway.
Our big snowmobile has had the problem ever since we bought it of suddenly deciding not to start. The first time, we left it until we could get a truck and trailer near it (we bought it in the early spring) and hauled it to the local shop, where it sat for three months before they could get to it. It fired right up for them, and they couldn’t fix something not broken. So, we brought it home, only for it to do it again in the middle of that winter. I left it, and went looking for a solution online. I thought I found one, and after making the adjustments, the machine started and ran for the rest of the winter. Well, it did it again last week. It is sitting at my son’s driveway, dead, and we have started troubleshooting it again. After going down a couple of unsuccessful paths, we think we may have found the issue. The computer, the brain of the machine, has a very small light that is supposed to light briefly when the key is turned, and then go out; unless there’s a problem, in which case, it flashes a code. Once we located the light, we discovered that the light isn’t coming on at all, and we found out that others have had this trouble as these snowmobiles get older. Some people online have referred to it as the computer having a “senior moment,” where it will, after a month or so, remember that it’s part of the machine and start working again. It’s a sign that the computer is going bad. We have located a replacement for it, though it is also used, since the manufacturer no longer makes parts for machines this old. Our only other option, should this happen again, would be to turn it into a carbureted machine, instead of fuel injected. This is expensive and a last resort. I will more than likely buy a newer snowmobile, instead, at that point, though I really like this one.
The pups have been enjoying the snow, as is Jade. She’s getting old, and we think she has arthritis now, as sometimes she will limp. If we could get her off the mountain this time of the year, we would take her to the vets and see if they could help. As it is, we try and let her take her time. She also likes the colder weather; St. Bernard’s are like that. This spring, when we can drive in with the pickup again, we will take Jade in for a checkup, getting her any medication she needs to make her life easier.
We had purchased two top-of-the-line handheld CB radios for use when the logging started up here, as it was supposed to do after Thanksgiving, The only issue we have had with them was we couldn’t reach each other when one of us was down at the pickup (without the antenna for the truck), two miles away, nor at the spring, a mile away. Maybe you think, “Well that’s probably because of all the trees and no radio has that kind of range.” Well, yesterday, while the lovely wife was up in the city with a sports team, she went to a big box store while she was waiting for the team to finish their game. She found small walkie talkies for $10 apiece, and thought she would grab two so we could talk to my son from our cabin to his instead of relying on the phones, which often times have bad service up here. Not only do those little radios work, my son took one down with him to his pickup when he went to pick up his wife, and we could talk, clearly, from there. It’s amazing that two cheap walkie talkies work better than the expensive radios.
Well, that’s all the news for the week. Bye for now.
