New Year Update

We have had some fantastic runs over the winter break and also spent a fair amount of time putting in and re-putting in trails!

And it has been COLD!  Well, not Fairbanks-cold but very cold for around here.  It all started around Solstice when we got a lot of new snow.  Then things turned windy and all that fresh snow blew in deep over our trails, burying them completely.

We have a snowmachine, for the first time, this year to help keep our trails open and so out we went to open back up all those freshly obscured trails…. And promptly we stuck it!  Which meant we then had a buried trail AND a buried snowmachine.  And promptly we burned out the snowmachine belt trying to get it un-stuck (a belt on a snowmachine is a lot like a chain on a bike- without it you aren’t going anywhere!).  Boy, I sure do hate those things!

What could we do?  Well, first we walked home, had a nice warm drink around the wood stove, slept in a soft and warm bed, and forgot all about the mechanical beast freezing out there in the wild five miles from home!  Then we woke up, got a new belt, and tromped back out into the woods.  But, by that time, it was dark again and so there we were in the dark pulling and pulling and pulling on start cord until finally it roared to life and away we went!  Yahoo!

But it didn’t take long, with the wind blowing as we rode home to realize that with all that pulling we had worked up a huge sweat.  We were soaked!  And when we looked down at the thermometer we keep tethered to our survival bag we saw it was bottomed out!  As low as it would go… and way below the last marked temp of –25F!  Yikes.

If we had been any further out we probably would have had to stop, build a fire, and dry out.  But so close to home we just pushed on and got indoors and out of our wet gear.

Ofcourse, now, after letting this post sit on my computer for a few days, it dumpingrain as I write!  So, you just never know about the weather!