I get all kinds of big ideas. I tell myself to keep up on this blog as a record of what I’m doing in my life, but then everything seems too mundane to write about or else I’m so deep in the middle of it that I forget. Or it could be I’m in places without internet to upload anything. So what I do upload is usually to Instagram because then my mom will see what I’m up to.
I started this post on July 13, a week and a half into an adventure driving bus for fire crews. Then I got stalled due to lack of internet and mental bandwidth. I know, not the best reasons, but life has a way of flowing on.
This post started life as a photo dump with planned captions. I will just add to it. Enjoy!
Late June there was a lot of smoke in the air, first from a wildfire down near Delta Junction (100 miles south of Fairbanks) then from fires much closer. The Minto Lakes fire got started northwest of Fairbanks and was working its way up along the Chatanika River. Transportation was needed to get fire crews out to where their work was. A friend of a friend knew a guy who needed drivers. He has a fleet of buses that he supplies to the Forestry department, but they can’t go out without drivers. I had the qualifications and the ability to say yes to the opportunity. The first crew assigned to me spent time on structure assessment, then one evening got the call to respond to a different fire. There were plenty of dry thunderstorms to spark off more spot fires. This one was not easily accessible, so once we arrived as close as the bus could get we had to wait for logistics to work out how to get them there. This photo was taken at 2am, when the crew finally bedded down to get some rest. The next morning a helicopter came to fly them to where they could work the fire. The thunderstorms didn’t stay completely dry. We had some good, thick, wet clouds come up. Later that day there was a big, heavy storm that blew over a few trees and soaked the crews. I missed it because I was on another adventure, delivering a second crew to the spot fire.The first crew I took got in by helicopter. The second crew were able to access the fire from the far side of the Fort Knox gold mine. We drove 10 miles through to get them to where they needed to be. That haul truck is so big that we drove in a single wheel track. What is a four lane road to normal traffic is a two lane road to them. It was a pretty cool experience. My accommodations weren’t fancy, but I was comfortable enough. In the morning I would fold up and stow my bedding and the crew could fill the cargo cage with their gear. I never had to worry about getting rained on.This was the main campfire at the drop point where I was stationed. Most crews had their own sites, but this one served the smaller groups like the dozer crews, medics, and single fire trucks. I love the way they set up this firepit. It made it easy for multiple people to cook their dinners at the same time, and there was almost always a pot of hot water available. Skip forward a month into August. Sunset rainbows are awesome. I wanted to make a joke about how there probably is gold at the end of this rainbow if you are willing to do the work, but then I realized that isn’t a joke. It is a simple truth. Back to the regular job… This is a taste of the good life. The last Saturday before we welcomed guests we had a staff only sunset cruise in the Haglund. We bumped our way up the fire break to the top of the ridge in this beast. There we had smores, beverages, and good conversations while the sky lit up. A wind storm made trail maintenance necessary. It was a great reason to go out and make sure that nothing would get in the way of guest adventures. Fortunately there was only one tree across the trail. I do love watching the sky up here. Sunsets are the best. This was just a couple of days ago. Staff did another after hours ride along the trails. Look at that fall color! Enjoy it while it lasts because the snow is only a few weeks away. Riding along the pipeline you don’t want to be overheight to make the turn. This was today. I should have been able to finish the quilting on this one this morning, but I managed to break my last two needles. Such aggravation! I’m determined to finish both this and the green version before the end of the year.
That brings me up to date for now. There’s a lot that I might have missed, but I tend to live in the present so I probably won’t go back unless I get a good enough reason to.
I’ve started another notebook journal (again) and I’m hoping it will help me develop some ideas that make it out of the notebook and onto the website. So hopefully that means more content for people to enjoy and interact with.
Even though I am a professional driver, I always had one thing that I avoided like the plague. I hate backing trailers! I can back Blue into any place I need my truck to be. I even confidently maneuvered 40 ft transit busses when and wherever needed. I would refuse to take the utility trailer to the dump by myself because I would have to back it in and embarrass myself. I had fully convinced myself that I couldn’t do it.
That ends here and now!
Since last week I have been hauling gravel for work. They need several hundred yards of gravel to top the driveway and paths and to set up a new septic system. So they gave me a work truck and a dump trailer and told me to see how many trips I can make every day. The gravel pit is open from 7 to 5 and is 40 minutes away. So far 6 trips is as good as I can do. Several hundred yards…4.5 yards at a time. And every load requires me to back up a trailer.
Yesterday I dropped multiple loads in front of the lodge. They are all lined up next to each other nicely. Just seeing that and thinking “I did that!” makes me happy.
Then today I was told to switch product to prepare a septic system. They need 90 yards here by Friday to keep the project from being delayed. It’s a good thing they have a second driver running gravel too! We might just manage it. The challenge is to get backed in down a winding driveway without hitting anything, then down a ramp built to allow us to drop the load in the hole. But of course it was raining and the ground is soft under the rock. The truck need to be helped out each time.
This time last year I could not have done this work. I would not have been confident enough. I would have found a way to get out of it, or if I tried it I would have had a nervous breakdown and fallen apart. Not this year. This year I am ready to tackle some of the hard things and succeed. Watch out for next year! Maybe I’ll quit making excuses to avoid upgrading to the Class A CDL.
It’s easy to find reasons to avoid things that are hard. But in avoiding those things you miss out on that feeling of triumph when you succeed. Go for the hard things. Don’t listen to the voice in the back of your head that says you can’t. Don’t hold yourself back. Keep growing. Be the windshield. Squash the bugs.
Just don’t expect to hear that I’m turning into an ice road trucker any time soon. My confidence has yet to exceed my skill.
Before sunrise this morning I drove to work facing the full moon the entire way. This might be my new favorite sight. 10:20am sunrise. A view from my work. Noon at Basecamp, and the sun hasn’t gotten above the taller trees. 1:35 pm today. The days might be short, but the colors go on for hours. An afternoon drive. I get to share these views with the guests I drive in the shuttle. They think they are coming here to see the aurora, but that’s just the cherry on top. 1:40pm and sunset colors are already flooding the sky. 3:30pm. The sun is mostly down, but there is still color and light. This is my view of my friend’s cabin across the frozen creek.
Before coming to Fairbanks I knew that daylight would be an issue. At the summer solstice the sun might set for 3 hours, but it doesn’t get dark. In winter it is the opposite issue. Days get shorter and shorter until the sun is only up for 3 hours, but here the darkness is not complete. Sunrise colors start an hour or more before the sun shows up and last longer too. Sunset colors can be in the sky up to 2 hours before the sun goes down and they take time to fade along with the light. On a really good day there is color across the sky and reflected from the snow all day. It is a constantly shifting light show and the sheer beauty makes up for all the challenges that come from living up here.
I drive a shuttle van to bring tourists to and from a destination with an aurora borealis theme. People who wanted to go to Iceland or Norway to see the Northern Lights have had to shift their plans to Alaska. They always ask me about the chances of a good show. I always tell them I can promise nothing on the aurora, but I also always point out the colors in the sky and tell them how much I love watching the shifting of the light. I’ve had more than one person thank me on our trip back into town. I’ve been told that even with a good aurora show overnight they still loved watching the daylight almost as much. When something is in short supply you find a greater appreciation for it.
I hope I never get tired of seeing all of this beauty in my world.
…but this one has been floating around the book of faces for a couple of weeks and it makes me want to tell stories.
So far I have refrained from hijacking people’s posts with my reactions to this one, but there are so many things I want to reply! Fortunately I have an outlet that can’t be called hijacking. I just stole the meme to start with.
These are the roads I have been driving for the last month. They’re going to be like this to some degree until March or April. This being my first winter in Alaska, I have had to do some adapting. My knowledge of snow driving only came from the crap we got in Portland, Oregon. Most of the time snow there came at 30-34° and we never knew what portion of it would be snow vs freezing rain or what order it would come in. The city, county, and state barely knew how to clear it if they even had the equipment. Last time we got a big snowstorm in Portland we discovered that the city had sold off most of its snow removal equipment to avoid the storage and maintenance expense. Seattle had to send down plows to help, but by the time they arrived it had all frozen into rutted ice on the roads that made driving an absolute misery.
Here in Alaska it’s a different story. Downtown still gets some rutted ice, but the DOT doesn’t mess around on the highways. Even the smaller rural roads (like the one in my picture) get plowed. Some of them are plowed by the people who live there and use the road. It makes a huge difference when there is a significant snowfall like last Friday. I had to pull my friend’s Prius out of their own driveway because it got high centered on the unplowed snow. They ended up parking near their road where I was able to pack down the snow with my truck. There was talk about asking the neighbor with a plow to make a pass through for them.
Temperature makes a big difference in traction and snow behavior. When giving me driving advice everyone told me that if it’s warmer than 15-20° the roads are going to be more slick. Colder than 15° and they aren’t so much to worry about. The friend who drives the haul road (ice road that doesn’t go across frozen lakes) explained that the colder it gets the better your traction can be. At -20° the weight of his truck will melt a bit of the ice on the road, which then immediately refreezes, causing the tires to stick to the road. Kind of like if you were to try licking a frozen metal fence post. (Don’t try that.) The traction comes from constantly freezing and unsticking as the tires roll down the road. Even with my considerably lighter weight van I can feel the difference in traction at those colder temps.
This doesn’t mean that everyone has great traction. Good tires help. Good driving habits help more. Last week when we got a foot of snow we counted at least 9 cars in the ditch on the way into town. I tend to drive the speed that the road and my vehicle tell me is safe. If I feel a bit of sliding wobble I let off the accelerator until I’m stable. I feel zero need to go the speed limit on the sign. But I get people flying past me all the time. I haven’t yet seen any of them lose it but I’ve had other people tell me about watching someone hit the ditch in a cloud of snow after passing recklessly.
Now for the towing story. It isn’t entirely snow related, but I found it interesting. I got to spend time with some co-workers after work. One of them brought her husband who has lots of stories and loves to tell them. He was describing how he wants to get a property farther out from town and set up a mechanic shop with maybe a couple of tow trucks. An encounter with a disabled vehicle during hunting season made him think it might be a useful venture.
He was way north of Fairbanks, maybe a hundred miles or so. There’s a whole lot of nothing up there in a way you can’t imagine until you see it. He saw a guy stopped alongside the road in a pickup with a trailer. He had two moose carcasses in the back of the truck and more on the trailer. It turns out the guy was bringing back the results of the hunting party but the alternator went out on the truck. He offered to help get the truck running enough to limp back to town, but the guy declined. He was waiting for a tow truck. He had been waiting for 11 hours and the bears were starting to circle, attracted by the moose meat, but he had been required to prepay $1000 just to get the truck sent out and by golly he was going to get his money’s worth.
After making sure he couldn’t do anything to help the mechanic continued down the highway. After a while he came across a tow truck that had a different pickup loaded up on the back. He flagged him down and asked if he was looking for a disabled truck of a certain description. The tow driver said yeah, but he couldn’t find it. But there was this truck left on the side of the road so he wasn’t going back empty handed. At this point the mechanic was like WTF! The truck he had loaded up probably belonged to a hunter who was going to come back to no vehicle while the guy who already paid for the help was literally going to be abandoned to the bears. The tow driver had not even considered that the vehicle he grabbed might not be abandoned. He was persuaded to put it back and was given directions to find the right vehicle. The mechanic took this incident as proof that there is a need out there.
See? Too much to hijack someone’s post. But it makes a good post of my own.
