A Confession

No, this is nothing bad! However, as some of you gathered Facebook, we did have an adventure with the atv within the first 12 hours of buying it. And since it seems the whole town knows about it, I might as well publish it for all the internet to see. :)

We'd been warned not to ride out on the tundra yet, as it's still very wet and muddy here. Everyone told us to wait until it froze. And of course we listened to that advice. Um . . . not so much. In our defense, we were on a trail and following tracks. The problem was that it had been raining a lot and, as we soon discovered, the mud is very difficult to judge just looking at it. The atv did great in the first few mud patches. The we hit a deeper patch and sank. And when I say sank, the mud came up about 3/4 of the way up the tires. Oops!

Marshall had the right idea and we traipsed off to gather branches. Thankfully the trees here are short and pretty weak, so we were able to break off a big pile. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the branches under the wheels far enough to get enough traction, and the two of us couldn't lift the atv on our own. On top of that, the mud was intense and kept trying to eat my galoshes!

So we were forced to make the call of shame. Ha ha ha! We were lucky and within walking distance of a friend's house. He and a neighbor came out and the four us us were able free the atv. We had enough materials, so we all just lifted each side of vehicle, placing the branches cross-wise under the wheels. After that it, it got out easily. Problem solved! 

Thank goodness for the niceness of people here. We were also very lucky we were near the road, knew where we were, and that the weather was clear. It could have been a much worse experience. You better believe we'll be very careful when snowmachining this winter. This is not a pace to mess around or think that you can overcome the weather with no precaution or plan.

Taking a picture of the atv stuck in the mud was not the first thing on our mind so we don't have documentation of this adventure. We were more worried about the solution and approaching clouds. It's not like we could just call AAA here. :) However, you can see some of the mud in the above picture. We took this a day later so that shows how much we had already cleaned off.

For your enjoyment, here are some more pictures of the tundra. It is so beautiful in its own way, flat with a few crests, some scrub trees, grasses, and wild berries (all edible). There are different seasons of berries (cranberries and crowberries are out now). You can just go out and pick them freely. We often see people with their buckets preparing for winter. Marshall and I picked some the other day and ate them as we found them. Fresh cranberries! The tundra is solid in some spots, and spongy or muddy in others. Such an odd surface, and very tiring to walk across.

Hanger Lake

View from Ptarmigan Rd.