Living in Montana, you need to take a jacket along wherever you go no matter what time of year. To say our weather is fickle is an understatement. Taking this a bit further, if you drive into the mountains, you are wise to take along a shovel and a chainsaw and you need to be prepared for anything.
A shovel for snow or mud.
A chainsaw for clearing trees
that have dropped across the road. I
have been forced to saw trees out of the road twice on trips to my cabin this
year. Once on the way in. Once on the way out.
Anything means anything.
Yesterday, I rode into the
mountains with a friend. We started off
following rivers through low valleys of pastures and hayfields. Eventually,
we found ourselves entering the Garnet Range.
Our entry to the range began amid
gentle rolls and inclines of sagebrush and juniper. Soon enough, we found ourselves switchbacking
up into timbered mountains. The first
snow we encountered was little more than white brushstrokes atop deadfall and the
occasional shaded patch deeper in the understory.
The road narrowed and became
rugged. Four-wheel-drive stuff.
Soon enough the upward inclines
and the snow became fixed all around us.
Upon entering a swath of lodgepole pine everything changed. Heavy
rains preceding the snow had formed deep pools of water in the road. Nearly two inches of ice had formed on the
surface of these pools. We also began to
encounter—quite often—places where another rig traveling through ahead of us
had used a chainsaw to saw apart and remove fallen lodgepole pines from across
the primitive road. A quarter-mile
later, tracks in the snow revealed where the truck preceding us had given up, turned
around, and backtracked out of the lodgepole forest.
We found ourselves breaking
trail and quickly encounter several deep puddles. Our rig crashed through them—bucking on the
way in and the way out. Not long after,
we encounter trees across the road.
Out with the chainsaw.
The end came a few yards after
clearing the second tree. We came upon a
frozen pool some thirty or so feet across.
No way around through the trees.
The puddle looked pretty deep. My
partner and I climbed out of the truck and assessed. He busted through the ice with a shovel and
tested the depth in a few spots. The
shovel went deep midway along the length of the pool.
“What do you think? Try it?” he asked.
“Doesn’t look good to me. I don’t want to spend the night here.”
“Yeah, the ice bothers me too.”
Back down into the valleys on
the same road we went. Sometimes you
cross the mountains. Sometimes you
don’t.
Entering the Mountains
The Expanse Around Us
Sawing a Tree Out of the Road
—Mitchell Hegman
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