Day 4

Tuesday 2/9/99

I was snowing again/still.

Tom was still sick, as was Scott's MXZ, so Scott made the necessary arrangements to rent Tom's 99 Polaris XC500. I suspect Scott got a rash of some sort from being in contact with a Polaris for that long ; )

 

We decided to head south to the Island Park south plateau area.

Just a few miles out of town I blew a belt. It turns out that when the previous owner had rolled the chaincase, he hadn't moved the heat exchanger out of the way of the driven clutch. This caused the drive belt to rub on the guard that protects the coolant hoses, eventually overheating the belt. So after some trailside bending of the hose guard and a zip-tie to hold it down, I was ready to go.

A little farther down the trail I noticed that my EGT (exhaust gas temperature gauge) was reading bursts of 1400+ degrees! This means my engine is about to melt down from a lean fuel mixture. I knew we were heading to lower elevation, so I didn't think to question the EGT reading at the time. So another stop to change my jetting (needle position) and we were back underway.

We cruised around one of our usual play spots, getting stuck a few times of course. Scott also managed to get tossed from his sled, and I got his picture just before he got back to it. He knew I had a camera so he was moving fast!

We decided to take the Black Bear Cutoff trial back to West Yellowstone. But a few miles down the trail all the tracks stopped and turned around. The trail was blown closed on a side hill with a seris of 3'-6' drifts, some of which were vertical, that stretched as far as we could see. Cool! We were going to be the first to break open this trail. Ken said the trail turned into the woods shortly and should be sheltered and more passable there. We started moving, getting stuck occasionally. We could get around the worst spots by dropping off the shelf trail and sidehilling around the nastiness. This was a blast, until it got dark. We kept pressing on beacuse it was warm, we had my GPS, and Ken knew exactly where we were. Did I mention it had been snowing for days? When the sun went down, we couldn't see the sidehills well enough to drop blindly off the trail so we had to stay on the trail. Visability was down to about 6' and it was pitch black. This led to Ken dropping into some 8' wind cravasses while he was leading. Yes 8' cravasses ON THE TRAIL, that's how much snow there was. He was lucky that they all had sloping openings he could ride out of. Then I broke trail for a while until I rode right off a 10' veticle drift and jammed my wrist when I landed on one ski and had the bars ripped out of my hands (Editor's note: he didn't mention this during his late-night phone call...). Every clearing was a challenge to figure out which way the trail left the clearing. I kept logging GPS waypoints in case of emergencies. Finally the trail turned 180 degrees on itself into a switchback shelf trail cut into a 45 degree slope. The trail had been totally filled with snow and Ken couldn't side hill it. Also Scott stuck the XC vertically against a tree while trying to skirt a huge drift. I think it was about 6 pm at this point and Ken said we had another eleven miles to cover. Since we had a badly buried sled, and it had taken us two hours to go about 3 miles, we decided to turn back.

We dug out the sleds, turned them around and we all exchaged "high-fives" for the coolest trail ride of our life. But getting back wasn't as easy as we thought it would be. Our tracks were already covered from the raging blizzard and we were having trouble finding the trail exits from the clearings. We even had a "calm" disagreement in one clearing where Ken got disoriented and wanted to head back the direction we had just come from. The GPS was pulled out to find the way out. Nothing like vertigo in a blizzard on the side of a mountain to get the heart pumping! When we finally made it Mac's Inn at Island Park it was closed! I was out of oil, and everyone was low on gas, and we knew our hotel owners (Golden West Motel) would be getting worrried. We pressed on the the next known gas station a few miles down and it was closed. I siphoned injection oil from Steve's sled and Ken called the hotel at 8:50 to tell Darrel & Judy we were safe and off the high country. It turns out they were ten minutes from calling Search and Rescue. We told them we'd be back soon if we could find gas and oil. We finally found gas and oil at Valley View. I put 11.3 gallons of gas in my 10.7 gallon tank! The station owner said all the highways were closed and there were three truckers stranded at the station for the night, including one who was stuck a mile or so up the road and looked a little shook up. From Valley View, we rode back to town arriving at 10:30 pm. All we could find that would feed us dinner was the bar at The Gusher, but those frozen pizzas tasted pretty darn good. (Editor's note: maybe I could talk him into a nice Carribean Cruise next year instead...)

 

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