Always Something

All has been well on the dogsledding front; the dogs are in amazing shape this winter the trail conditions have been great and we have been very busy. The past week has thrown some obstacles my way however. It started out with the clutch on the tractor failing as I was snow blowing the road. I just spent over $3,000.00 to have the engine rebuilt on the old Massy Ferguson over the summer and had hoped it would be all set for another fifty years after that. That was not meant to be apparently and off it went back to the shop for another major repair. We have to have the tractor to keep our road open. It’s a class four road so the town does not maintain it so we have almost a quarter mile to keep clear. So far it has been four days at the shop and we have not had any major snow luckily. If all goes well I may be getting it back today or tomorrow. Right after I had the tractor trucked to the shop for repairs I noticed transmission fluid leaking from my dog truck. I had just taken it in a few days before for a recall and apparently they messed up the rear seal on the transmission. I was advised not to drive it since there is no way of telling what the fluid level is on a Toyota Tundra. This prompted yet another call to the wrecker service. They are making some money on me this month... Of course no truck means no running dogs as I have no way to move them. We had tours booked at Stowe Mountain Resort but were unable to run them because of this latest issue. With a pretty full weekend of tours coming up I sure hope the truck is fixed today and I am able to get it back. I hate to cancel tours and disappoint customers.

So far this winter I have not had to cancel any tours. We have really been lucky with the weather. Each time it has been warm and rained it has been during the week and by the weekend things had cooled down and the trail has been fine. We are expecting one more round of mixed precipitation tomorrow (Friday) that is suppose to finish off as snow overnight so with any luck we will have good conditions again on Saturday.

On top of all of this I came down with my third cold of the season. I guess the timing for that couldn’t have been much better. With no truck and no way of going anywhere I had little choice but to sit at home and rest. I’m feeling much better as I write this and should be in great shape for the weekend. I’m not sure what is going on with my system this winter. Last year I was not sick once all winter long. This year I have been sick three times within a span of five weeks. It could be that I am pushing myself a little too hard with all of the tours I have had. I do typically have down time though so I’m not convinced that is the problem.

I’ll close for now and wait to hear about the tractor and truck. Not much else I can do...

Back to The Drawing Board

Given that I had exhausted all of my options in regard to getting the side bridge to work I had no choice but to start thinking about a way to make a bridge straight across the stream where the old logging bridge had once been. This was a 32 foot span; how was I going to get a bridge across that? I started making phone calls to get information on steel beams, laminated beams, anything I could use to span this stream. Steel was going to cost over $1,000.00 and the beams would weight around 1000 pounds. Without the ability to get some sort of a crane up there I would have no way of moving anything like that. I decided to ask about dropping some trees to build a wooden bridge and was given permission to do that. I then got on the phone and tried to gather as many people as I could to help out. I bought more lumber and was able to pull it all to the bridge site with my Skandic snowmobile. With everything in place we arrived at the day for the project to begin. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with five or six people in a day. We had a 35 foot by five foot wide bridge 90% complete by 5:00 in the evening. It was a full day and I was so tired I could hardly see straight but we had a bridge with no corners to make; just a straight shot across!

I could hardly wait to try it out with a dog team. I didn’t have to wait long; we had some more snow a few days later and after packing the trail again we hooked up some eight dog teams and gave it a go. The bridge worked perfectly and it offers a great view of the waterfall and gorge below. With that out of the way I was pretty well set up for running there for the winter. We have had a few other minor projects such as ongoing brush work to keep the trail clear and some shoveling to fill in some washed out spots after a rainy spell we had. I hope to do some drainage work on the road bed next summer to eliminate some of those wet areas. Over all it has been a fantastic location for running this winter.

The tours have been going great and I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of really great people this winter. Besides getting to spend so much time with my dogs meeting new people from all over the world is one of the things I like most about this endeavor. I do tend to get a little cynical from listening to the news and reading about all of the discouraging things that are happening in the world and all of the wonderful people I meet through dogsledding really helps restore my faith in humanity. The pups are a amazing bridge across cultures and lifestyles. We’ve had families from the Bahrain, Columbia, South Africa as well as just down the road from here. The business has kind of taken on a life of its own and I sometimes feel like I’m just along for the ride. Where will it take me? I really can’t say but time will tell.

The Side Bridge

I am loosing sleep worrying about how to cross this damn stream. I went back to the site to take another look and see about a possible reroute which might allow a straight approach to the bridge. There is an old logging trail off of the end that might work; it just has a lot of brush growing in it so I think if I cut that it might work. There is a pretty large ridge before getting back to the main trail but it might be doable. I cut the brush then asked both employees to join me for another training run. I figured I might as well have some weight in the sled since that will be the situation for tours. We approached the new side trail and I was nervous; it was still pretty tight with a pretty good bend in it plus it had a rise of about eight feet in the space of about twenty feet. Not great. We went into the spur and the dogs pulled the sled up the sharp rise until they were down side of it and the sled was on the uphill side at which point we stopped dead. It was too steep for them to pull a loaded sled up. I was able to get behind the sled and push with everything I had to get the sled over the top at which point we shot down the other side and into another corner. Over went the sled. %$#@! The corner is too sharp and if I can’t get a sled through there how can I expect my help who have much less driving experience than I do to make it? We did the remainder of the run and on the way back I was actually able to get us across the bride and through the reroute without incident but it wasn’t easy.

Now what to do? Yet another; bigger reroute? I went back to the site to look around some more. Maybe I could run the spur a little further out on the old logging road and it could work. We went back and spent another half day working on another approach trail. The following weekend I had tour booked at 12:00 and we had not yet run the new spur trail. Stress, oh yeah. It happened to be on a Sunday when my wife was off from work so she agreed to go help me and we were going to do one run with half of the dogs before the actual tour then run the other eight for the tour. We hooked up the team and off we went. I made it through the new reroute and over the bridge but it was still pretty scary. I’m once again thinking to myself that there is no way my help is going to get a loaded sled through this spot. We did the rest of the run and came back; crossed the bridge and headed into the spur trail. As we were about half way through we went around a sharp turn with a drop off to the right and I lost control of the sled. Over and down we went. I hit so hard that it sheared the laminated ash driving bow off of the sled. My wife was limping from banging her knee on something and she had scratch on the side of her forehead. We somehow got the sled up and back on the trail and made it back to the truck.

Now I have guests coming for a tour in forty five minutes; a broken sled and no safe trail. The first thought was to cancel and go home. My second thought was that they had come all the way from New Hampshire mainly to go on this dogsled ride. My third thought was that I had just enough time to run home; grab my second sled and get back here to meet them but how were we going to make it across the damn bridge? There was no way I would attempt to drive them through the spur trail after what had just happened. I decided we could sled to the bridge location; unhook each dog and walk them across the bridge one a time and hook them back up on the other side. This was time consuming but all went well and the guests were able to have a little extra interaction with the dogs.

I managed to pull this tour off but we really don’t want to be unhooking and walking the dogs across this bridge all winter long. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that somehow; some way I was going to have to build a thirty five foot span bridge seven feet in the air where the old logging bridge used to be. I had no idea how since there is not a way for equipment to get in to the site. I had also burned up another week attempting to make the side bridge work. Four days working out there and $250.00 worth of lumber and we still didn’t have a workable solution.