Photography by Ed Book
sometimes, you get stuck… I didn’t do it
The LMC (big) trail groomer was digging down in the deep consolidated snow to get down three feet to the snowmobile shed doors at Snow Bowl Hut so we could get the two snowmobiles out to help with trail grooming… but… the machine got “highcentered” on ice with the tracks turning and gaining no purchase… no traction… and soon turning in the air…
I was just arriving last Friday afternoon in Ashford when a call to help went out and we went up to bring the (smaller) Pisten Bulley groomer from the other side of the valley to pull out the LMC… but… we couldn’t get the Pisten Bulley started… bringing a vehicle up, to jump start the now dead batteried machine, didn’t help either and we guessed the problem to be the kill switch frozen in kill position… and we couldn’t find where it was connected down in the engine compartment…
moot point though because neither could we locate anyone with the type of hitch on their vehicle we would need to tow the Pisten Bulley trailer… but… if we waited till later with the amount of snow falling, we’d be able to drive it across the low Nisqually Valley in snow as the temperature was dropping as was the snow level…
I took the large Alpina, two-tracked, snowmobile up to Snow Bowl to start digging out the LMC. I looked at it’s predicament and decided to wait till morning when more help would arrive. In the morning, ski patrollers gathered with the new snowshovels and scoop shovels we bought just last week, and along with personal avalanche shovels started….. shoveling…
we shoveled, kibitzed, shoveled, chipped ice from underneath, shoveled, pried beams under the tracks, and shoveled some more…
here are some photos of the efforts… great fun was had by all… Bob was able to drive it out and fill in the hole he somebody had gotten the LMC into…
no one complained, being happy that it wasn’t them that was operating the machine at the time… you can see that I wasn’t doing all that much digging with my hurting shoulders (I had to make photos… yea, right)
after the LMC was freed, Bob B took me along grooming with him to show me how to operate it… and we groomed all the South District MTTA trails… Then, after dropping him off at the snowpark trailhead I took my turn at driving and drove it back up to Snow Bowl for the night–to groom myself with it the next day…
and I did ok–luckily not getting it stuck but also not driving much faster than I could walk on snowshoes and I didn’t dare try to use the plow blade until I get some more time concentrating on steering… steering a tracked vehicle isn’t anything like steering with a steering wheel. There are two levers, one for each track and it takes a while to get a feel for steering around curves and sometimes courage when the curve is banked downslope and when the slope steep with a long way down…. I’m a novice at driving the snowcats but am eager to learn… I got pretty proficient at grooming with the smaller Pisten Bulley but the LMC has a different ‘feel’.
Peace