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Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 01:09:03 :
On the way up the Joe in my honda car Sunday, I decided to see how far I could get up Slate Creek towards my cabin. The short way is from the north side over the St Joe divide, but that'll be snowed in until mid July this year. It's 13 miles of very rough road between my place and the Joe, but I did drag my old honda car over it once last year so I thought I'd give it a try. I didn't expect to get very far. I did have a tiny (14") chain saw with me and a folding shovel but no other "pioneer tools". It turns out some ATVer had been up the road, and had cut out some of the logs. The honda car could go under and around a lot of them. I only had to cut 20 or 30 small ones and throw some rocks out of the road. When I got to the last log, the saw finally gave up and refused to run at all, but I chopped enough branches off the log with the folding shovel that I could drive under it. Of course I dragged the bottom on everything, but the car has 300,000 miles on it, the bottom is beat up anyway, it needs a valve job that it's not going to get, and so I'm not trying to keep it pristine. I was surprised I got all the way up, until the big slide on my property, which is going to take real work to fix. I hung out for a while, checked out the winter's damage which consisted of: fiberglass cab of the M211 brush truck broken, cab of the 1952 M37 smashed in, top of utility body of the 1956 telephone truck smashed in, and shed #3 collapsed, wrecking the hood of 1962 Studebaker M35 (which I'd left up to discourage pack rats) along with the front grill and windshield, and various other things in that shed smashed. I had to get back to town, which is about a 3 hour drive going around the long way, so I left.
I got the honda car stuck in a creek about a mile below my place. The creeks are running high, and several of them cross the road. This one had made quite a ditch for itself. Somehow I'd gotten across it on the way up, but not going back down. The water was up to the bumper and I had no way to get it out. No come-along, no jack, not even a working saw to cut poles to pry the car up or out with. And no helper. If I left the car in the creek, it would be a 13 mile walk in either direction, either the short way over a very snowy mountain to my house, or the long way via Stanley's ranch on the Joe.
It turns out I'd accidentally left the battery in the M37 over the winter. I would normally bring it back to town, but I forgot. What's the chance of a battery staying good after a winter buried under 5-10' of snow? Anyway, it was my only chance, so I hiked back up, reconnected the battery ground cable, found out the lights came on, poured some gas down the carburetor, and fired it right up. It had a flat tire, but I'd just stuck a jack, a budd wrench and a bar under the seat last year. Got the tire changed, rummaged around and found some small cable chokers with slip hooks on the ends and a binder chain, and drove back down to where the honda was stuck. Of course the M37 pulled it back out with no trouble at all. I moved the car to the side and got the M37 on the other side of the creek so I could pull it out if it got stuck, but after throwing lots of rocks in the creek, the honda drove across okay, though it did rip what was left of a plastic shield off the underside. Drove the M37 back to my place, thanked it for its help and apologized for letting it get its cab smashed over the winter, and hustled back down to the honda car before dark.
If it hadn't been for that M37, I'd have had a long hike out and then would have to beg somebody to come and help me. Meanwhile the road would have been blocked to anybody trying to get by with anything bigger than an ATV. I was sure glad the M37 was there and had its battery still in it. On the way out I got to watch a moose about 10 yards away for a long time down by Prospect Flats. Now I get to think about how to fix all the damage. Anybody near North Idaho have 3 M-series arctic cab tops and an M35 hood to sell?
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