What a weekend this was. The wife and I drove to Cantwell Friday night minus the grandson who was getting a cold. Of course if you asked him he was more than well enough to go, but mom said no and he was major disappointed, can blame him as this was the last ride we had planned for the season. Poor guy, next season can’t come soon enough as far as he’s concerned.
The roads were in excellent shape all the way from Fairbanks to Cantwell, much better than I had expected. Spring road conditions are always a crap shoot, never know if their going to be icy and slick, snow covered or dry, guess we just got lucky.
So we had a nice but not to quiet night in our room at the Backwoods Lodge. Seems our next door neighbors were some out of town contractors who decided that Friday night was the night to stay up and drink and get loud, well their mission was a success to our misfortune. But we did get some sleep after they passed out and quieted down; hope they didn’t mind all the noise I made when I got up at 5:30 AM.
Any who, we headed to the Cantwell Lodge at 9:00 AM and had some coffee and meet Paul, his son, his son’s friend, Norman and Don. By 9:30 no one else showed up and we headed out to Summit to unload and ride. About 10:10 Tony showed up and I was surprised to see him, he usually doesn’t join us on these Cantwell trips but I was glad he made it.
I did haul the Kat Kitchen again and it was a benefit to have a long, but it’s going to need some more modifications to the hitch. More on that in a bit, but for now here’s what we rode into.
Not bad for the middle of April if you ask me. The sun was up and it got to a balmy 45 above. The conditions were excellent. Lots of fresh snow a good base and not many others around to see. So we off loaded and heading into towards Denali Nat’l Park. As you can see the wife was having a good time.
After a bit we got into those rolling hills and looked for a nice place to have lunch. As I said it was warming up so we tried to find a place with some shade and found about the best tree we could see.
Of course after a little snack the boys had to see who could out climb who so a little hill climbing was in order, the 2nd photo below is the avalanche they were riding next to. I didn’t go up, I have tendency to stay off hills that just had an avalanche not 100 feet to the right. But Paul did say he used his inclement and the slope degree they were climbing was safe based on the degree of angle. Well with that knowledge, nope still not going up.
But hey I came here to ride and enjoy this beautiful land I live in, so here are some pictures to show you why we do it.
So as I said early, the Kat Kitchen needs some work on the hitch. OK, so why you ask, well let’s see, as the day warmed up the snow got a bit mushy and I had to use a little throttle to get up some of the hills and just as I was climbing one those hills I hit a little ditch. The back of my sled and the front of the Kat Kitchen tongue decided to have a meeting of the forces, result, I need another rear light and the Kat Kitchen needs a new cover for the grill and grill. If it was only the grill that got busted, well OK we have a spare, but those dog gone tails lights are getting expensive to replace.
By 2:00 PM we decided the temps were getting to warm and the snow to mushy so we headed back to the rigs and loaded up about 5:00 PM. When we got back to room I noticed that my darling wife was getting sunburn. Yup, lots of sun reflecting off all that snow and no Coppertone. Darn.
Sunday morning was a repeat of Saturday, except we got more sleep Saturday night as our rowdy neighbors had moved on.
We did lose Tony, Norm and Don Sunday as they went back home, so it was s smaller group but just as nice. I wanted to explore the area north-west of Summit so we sort of moseyed in that direction and all was good until we lost Paul. I know he was just with us a couple minutes ago. Hum, so we started looking for him and we found him on his back (praying I think) and converting to tree hugging.
Paul was OK and actually smiling. I think he was just glad to be alive, but hey so was I on a day like this…….
So ended another season of riding in Alaska, now if that darn snow would just hurry up and get back here then I’d be smiling like my wife and Paul below.
