Grrrate...

The tractor originally came from Soldotna. It had been a rental unit there and had real low hours. It only needed a loader attachment. The local John Deere dealers found a loader for a 970 tractor in Anchorage and installed it before shipping it up to Fairbanks. That loader is a little bigger than the one for an 870 tractor and gave it a larger bucket. The loader only lacked a grill guard for it to be complete. No problem, I said, we’ll put one on ourselves.
Over the years, an occasional log has come over the top of the bucket, just missing the grill or headlights, but no harm was done. One time I picked up a heavy piece of equipment with a chain attached to the loader. Once lifted, it swung right into the front of the tractor. Amazingly, nothing happened. But I knew it was just a matter of time until something broke. Last summer when I was getting some parts at the dealer, I checked out a new tractor they had for sale. Not only did it have a grill guard, it was made of expanded metal, welded to the front of the loader frame. Incredible, I thought, the perfect grill guard. So the next time I was near one of the local steel yards, I wandered through their scrap pile and found a decent piece of expanded metal. They cut it to the approximate size and I had my grill guard. Well it only took another year or so to finally attach it to the tractor, trim it to fit, weld, sandblast, and then finally paint it John Deere green. Now it looks just like a factory job and it only took about twenty years.

Another Andy...

My two wheel dogs are both ten now; one is mostly retired and the other thinks he's got a part time job. So when I saw an add for a super hard working wheel dog named Andy, well I just had to respond to it. The woman who had the dog lived in Ruby, a small village on the mighty Yukon River, and she said he was just too strong for her to handle. That sounded perfect to me, but not so much for my wife Andy. While she tolerates my mushing addiction and occasionally runs a team herself, the thought of another crazed sled dog, leaping and barking in the yard, was, at best, not high on her to do list. But promises to finish the house, well at least keep at it, won the day. So now we have another Andy, a big, strong boy to help me get up those monster hills in the White Mtns.

Ice road truckers...

My friend Bill and I drove up to Bettles, a village north of the Arctic Circle to run our dogs. While it's normally isolated from the road system, the village puts an ice road in each winter to haul fuel and supplies from the Dalton Hwy. We heard a lot of horror stories about traveling the ice road, but the trip went remarkably well and I only hit one bad hole on the way in. Once we got there, the people we met helped us have a great time. On the last last day, we visited old Bettles. After WWII, the village was relocated seven miles upriver to where an airstrip was built, so now the original village is abandoned. All the old buildings are still there and it was an interesting bit of history to see. We hope to get back there sometime soon.

Is February the cruelest month?

Seems like if it isn't snowing this month, it drops down to near -40. It's great to finally get some decent snow after last winters drought, but enough already. It snowed over a foot and a half in the past week or so and over two feet for the month. And as soon as it stops, it's back down below zero. But it sure makes the mushing trails a lot smoother and gives the global warming skeptics something to gloat about. Here's a couple of photo's from a recent dog run. Spuds likes to roll around on his back when he gets hot. Looks weird, but he never gets tangled up in his tug line.

Another perspective on the recent weather: http://newsminer.com/view/full_story/12139655/article-Groomers-break-trail-after-back-to-back-blizzards-in-Interior-Alaska?instance=outdoors

New year updates...

Quite likely the most interesting fall in a while. Training on the 4-wheeler in Oct. to late Nov. Then the rains started and we had to cut ditches through the dog yard to keep the water away from the dog houses. After three days of rain, it cooled off and snowed half a foot, then dropped below zero until new year's eve. At least there's enough snow now to run dogs with a sled and the weather's warm enough to enjoy it.

Grindin' away

Back in '04 and 05 when we had a lot of forest fires, we cleared a bunch of trees near the house. It was a hard thing to do, we built the original cabin to fit in amongst the existing trees, but we did what we thought was necessary. When it came time to clear the stumps, we decided to try a stump grinder. It worked great and we cleared the whole area without tearing up the ground like a dozer would have done. Well since then we've accumulated a bunch of new stumps and it was time to get rid of them. The stump grinder, once I got it hooked up again, worked great, and now we have a stump free yard, until I drop some more trees.

Dozin' off again...

Spent the last few weeks out at Nome Creek off of the Steese Hwy. While it’s only about a 60 mile drive north of town, it’s a relatively remote area in the foothills of the White Mtns. This area had been mined years ago and while some reclamation had been done, a few of the larger piles remained. As the creek has continued to meander closer, the piles had begun to erode.
Drove the same dozer as last year, the first time that’s happened, so it made it a lot easier to feel comfortable on the machine and just focus on the work. Moving the old tailings piles back from the creek is a lot like peeling an onion, just strip it off a layer at a time. The hardest part is finding a place to put all the excess material. Fortunately, the miner had left an old bypass ditch behind the piles and it held stripped tailings nicely. It always seems like it takes forever to finish the dozing, but the biggest pile was reclaimed in just about a week. And it’s still a lot of fun to drive a piece of equipment nearly as big as the garage,

Busted...

Went down to Black Rapids to do some survey work on the Delta River. My friend Mike, who moved down to the lower 48 last fall (Last Trip on the Delta…Sep 26, 2009), came back up for a week to get his former project started again. He met me at the site with Tim, who would be taking over the project. The river looked pretty high when we were getting ready, but having surveyed there several times before, we figured we could deal with it. We had no trouble launching the boat or getting the cable strung over the river, but during the survey of the water depth and velocity, one of the vertical stanchions on the cross bar that attaches the boat to the cable broke. It sounded like a gun shot as it went flying off. Almost immediately, the boat began to turn side ways to the current. This was definitely not a good situation, as we were in the biggest standing waves on the river. Mike gunned the motor, which he had kept idling during the survey, and quickly straightened us out. I was able to get the other stanchion released from the cable and then we motored to the shore. We talked about what to do next and decided to try to take a few more readings along the cross section to estimate the unmeasured flow.

After we finished up, the consensus was that high water surveys on this river with the boat tied to a fixed tag line was obviously not the way to go. The high speed of the current and the turbulence in the standing waves put way too much strain on the equipment and we broke the weakest link. There’s a measuring system available that uses GPS for position and an acoustic doppler for depth and velocity, and we’ll try to get one to use next time. It was great to see Mike again and we hope he’ll be back up sometime soon.

Doggles...

Saw this posted on Wikipedia:

Doggles are a type of sunglasses for dogs, tinted goggles designed to fit the shape of a dog's head. While marketed as a fashion item, several practical and medical uses have been reported, including usage by military working dogs of the U.S. Army in Iraq.

I suppose, now that Spuds's a lead dog, he'll be expecting some rose colored doggles.

White Mountains 2...

The second trip to the White Mtns was not nearly as exciting as the first (White Mountains Mar 4), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. With all the overflow encountered on the last trip, I planned to mostly use Spuds in lead with Barney, since Chappy is deathly afraid of overflow. While he's somewhat of a reluctant lead dog, Spuds did great on this trip, as he and Barney took the team through all the bad sections of trail with no problems. The one odd thing that happened was that the moose kill we passed on the last trip, which originally was about a mile or two from the cabin, apparently was drug nearby, since every time I let a dog run loose for a few minutes, they'd come back with another bone. Had quite a collection by the time we left.

Hot dogs...

It's been pretty warm the last few days, up to 45°F . I'm heading out to the White Mtns again and really hoping that it cools off a bit. The dogs are running great, but the ones with heavy coats, the fuzzy ones, are really struggling with the heat. I guess we'll find out how well they can deal with the warm weather. It's kind of like the global warming, how well species adapt to change.

White Mountains...

Spent three days out in the White Mtns north of Fairbanks. Always an interesting trip, this time the highlights were a wolf killed moose and a runaway dog. The moose remains were scattered along the trail just a few miles from the cabin. A flock of ravens were scavenging it when we passed by and the dogs sure were excited for a bit. That night, I could hear the wolves howling close to the cabin. Several times during the night, the dogs woke me up with their furious barking, but in spite of the full moon, I never did see anything.

The runaway dog was from another team. I saw the musher on the way in and he mentioned in passing that he had lost one of his dogs. When we got to the cabin, the dog was standing on the porch, as if she was waiting there for someone to stop by. It was lucky I only had seven dogs, so there was a spot for her on the drop chain at night and also in the gang line when I ran the team out.

The trails were really good in some places, but also very rough and icy in others. The Beaver Creek crossing was perfect on the way in, but apparently had flooded with over flow and then completely frozen over afterwards. When I went out, the crossing was like a Zamboni had just finished with it. Just another fun trip in the White Mtns.