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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Monday, February 01, 2010 at 00:03:08 :
Thought I'd see if I could drive into my land even though it's the middle of winter, since there's only a couple inches of snow at that elevation right now. I was hoping to pull an axle shaft from my bone yard that might fit the Tucker, pull off a spare tire for my M37, and maybe get a few other things. It's 100 miles one way to go the low route, compared to 10 miles in the summer going over the mountain. I don't have a 4x4 that's fit to drive any distance, so I loaded chain saws, axes, pick axe, rock bar, survival gear, and lots of tools. As I started up the dirt road for the last 10 miles, it was clear I wasn't going to make it. There was only a couple inches of snow, but it had been frozen, thawed, frozen, and packed into pure ice.
With chains on the rear I had enough traction to go forward, despite being an unloaded truck with an open differential, but I had no steerage. The front wheels went whichever way the rear wanted to push them, which was often in a pretty dangerous direction. Going downhill was fine, since the chains kept the rear end where it needed to be, so I figured I could probably make it down into the canyon, but there was no way I would be able to get back up. I met a guy I knew who had been out wolf hunting and said he walked down into the canyon last Friday and the shady parts were pure ice. I know that area and I believe him. The road down in is steep, narrow, and crooked with no room for slippage. It was a bummer to go all that way and have to turn around, but with all that ice on the road the only way to do it is with a 4x4 with chains all around, which I don't have. I could try it with the M35, which is all chained up here in town, but I'd have to take the chains off, drive it 100 miles at 5 mpg, put all the chains back on (2 sets of dually chains plus singles on the front), and even then, that truck is awfully big for the road and it would leave even less margin for sliding. Since all my chains are just the standard style with no front-and-back cross links, they don't do much to keep a truck from sliding sideways on ice.
The weather's been really weird this winter. It hasn't snowed to amount to anything, and the weather's been about 35 degrees and spitting cold drizzle for at least a month, but the ground froze so hard and so deep last year that the ice isn't melting. The sun never comes out, the wind never blows, and it doesn't rain hard enough to melt any of it. Even everybody's lawn here in town is still frozen hard as a rock even though the air temp has been above freezing for weeks.
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