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How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend - 2008
Last updated on June 1, 2007 by The C.A.R.L.A. Team | This article is Archived | Permalink
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A Day in the Life of the C.A.R.L.A. Road Crew
"I now have first hand knowledge of how to build an igloo." - N6QOP
Well...It wasn't really that bad. But it wasn't that good. The day started out nice enough. We had breakfast at the Tahoe House Cafe and with coffee cups in hand we headed up the hill to repair the repeater. Now I should mention here that its about a 30 minute drive up the hill from the highway. But not today. Less than five minutes up the hill we came across the first of several patches of snow blocking the road. We tried driving the Tahoe across it but quickly dug a rut with two of the tires. Shovels out, we made pretty quick work of removing enough snow from around the tires to proceed on up the road.
A bit farther up the road we came upon the second mound of snow blocking our way. We worked on this one for about two and a half hours before finally taking a break for some (well deserved) lunch. We managed to regroup and blasted through the rest of this mound in thirty minutes.
We traveled quite a ways up the road before coming upon a third mound of snow. But as we started to dig, we noticed something different about this mound. It was semi-solid. Not solid enough to try driving over but solid enough to resist digging with shovels. So we got the ol' Binford 5000 chainsaw out and cut it into blocks.
We ended up with enough blocks of ice to make a small igloo... We managed to cut a path along one side big enough for the truck to pass in about forty five minutes.
Further on up the road, we ran into yet another patch of snow blocking our way. This time though, there was enough room to one side for us to drive around. Or so we thought. But the dirt was soft and the truck slid sideways just a little bit. Just enough to trap a fallen tree trunk between the tire and the exhaust pipe of the truck.
Moving the truck would have sheered the exhaust pipe clean off! SO... we got the chainsaw out once again, this time to cut some of the log out of the way. That did the trick. We were on our way once again.
With this last patch of snow behind us, we were now able to drive quite a distance towards the site. Eventually, as we had figured, we reached the snow line near the top and had to hike the last mile of road on foot. This would have been a nice afternoon hike...except for the mosquitos!! Swarms of mosquitos followed us every step of the way. And the person voted most likely to catch "west nile"... our very own N6- "Shorts" -MVT.
After several hours we finally arrived at the site. It took all of an hour to replace a bad PA on the main radio and C.A.R.L.A. 8 was back in business.The trip back down to civilization went pretty uneventful, except for one snow mound which needed about 5 minutes of shoveling to make it safe to pass. We made it back to the highway just as it got dark. All-in-all, it was a full days workout for the C.A.R.L.A. road crew.
"Snow - Nature's little Joke." - N6QOP