ATV Adventures
July 15, 2015 2:53 pm Leave your thoughts
A Short Story….
The day is Wednesday June 24th, the setting is beautiful White Spruce and Aspen mixed wood stands, with pockets of Black Spruce bogs and even sandy Jack Pine sites, in other words a very diverse forest area north of the mighty Lesser Slave Lake.
One thing you need to know is that these vast forests are not the only variable on the landscape. There is also…the weather. What started out as an awesome day laying out roads and inspecting watercourse crossings covering a solid 32 km on the ATV’s, ended in havoc. Our intention was to GPS these roads in a fashion that would result in us ending up at the trucks and leaving the bush in a timely manner. Now this is what actually happened, while trying out this “loop road” I described previously, we got just short of two kilometers from the truck, and our hopes were crushed by a large permanent watercourse which we reckoned was not crossable on the ATV’s. There was a great deal of time and discussion spent devising a plan to get across the creek as we were keen on getting through it, but the educated minds of my partner and I suggested that crossing the creek was a poor idea. FYI earlier in the day most if not all streams had culverts, and even a portable bridge was over the last large permanent watercourse we saw. Anyways’ the time is already approaching 5 o’clock pm and needless to say we began the 30km of backtracking to return to the truck. Fortunately it’s a little quicker going as we are not hanging flagging tape, were quite familiar with the trails at this point and not overly concerned about saving the GPS tracks.
However, we do begin to notice very drastic drops in temperature. These fluctuations are by far the craziest I’ve ever experienced and what neither of us knew was a freak storm had gone through where the truck was parked. Having been 30km away from the truck all day we never saw a drop of rain so as you can imagine we were quite surprised when we made it back and the bone dry road we came in on in the morning was now completely saturated. Also, the Legal road is infamous for going from great to poor in the span of a few rain drops, so we knew we were in for a doozie.
First off, I make the mistake of calling our check in service as I was confident that we would make it back to the Highway with no troubles. We later discovered was a miscalculation and that optimism was not enough to conquer the soupy Legal road. We struggle down the road, trailer in tow going every which way plowing through mud. Traction is poor, so our speed is about 10km an hour tops and continues to decrease.
Inevitably we slide into the ditch, but we try to maintain our speed and continue through the ditch. As we come to a stop we start to notice cattails over the hood of our GMC Sierra, which is bad news. So we swallow our pride and make the call to our boss, who was quick to round up her husband and their two work trucks to come tow us out. So we unhook the trailer, offload the quads and wait for help to arrive. Now it is approximately 7 o’clock when help arrives, and two pickups come slipping and sliding around the corner to rescue us. We engineer a two truck tug in order to free the truck from the ditch with a little struggle at first the GMC climbs out and we get out to the highway.
We end the day with some McDonald’s and some valuable lessons learned. We tackle the near miss reports the following day which needed to be revised since over the weekend somebody tried to steal our trailer from the ditch we left it in, and there was some damage but we got it beat now.
