IEP
In case you’ve ever wondered, it’s not all snowflakes and fir trees frosted with a new blanket of snow. It’s not always Olympic quality tracks sintered into the freshly groomed base.
Sometimes, the equipment we rely on just decides we need to get a little more acquainted. And it just stops. Frequently in the darnedest places.
There was the brain-box meltdown between upper and lower Scribner’s meadow. That was a long walk out…. There’s that one little washer that holds the whole track assembly on each axle of the Camso tracks that just up and fails for us. Luckily, we’ve been saved by others, so far.
But this year, things have been a little more subtle. A month ago we were out on Uller as it got dark. We took a break at Hoyt Rd and had tea and Carol’s famous trail cookies. When we started up again to go home, none of the cab lights, the wiper or the beacon worked… they were all working before.
Since that time, we found that if we wiggled a certain fuse/relay thingamajig, the circuits would work. Keep setting track, everything works.
That type of ‘if it works, don’t mess with it’ attitude was fine until we got to the garage one snowy evening and the Gator battery was dead, the thingamajig completely melted down. Tracks needed to be set, so the poor driver had to deal with crud on the windshield all night; the track sled monkey actually had it easy that night.
Meanwhile, here comes a February snowstorm.
Two of us couldn’t sleep wondering how we were going to keep up with the storm with no windshield wiper and 2/3’s of our lights.
There are people living around here who are, quite frankly, geniuses. They don’t advertise. One finds out about them by observing and listening; but they are there. They can come into a cold garage and poke here and there, pull things apart and stick the amp meter on them and come up with a solution, a fix and, in this case, all the parts and pieces necessary to solve our IEP (inexplicable electronic phenomenon).
Our sincere thanks go out to Cookie, Ross, Tim and Karl B for pulling us through things that those of us who are all thumbs can’t seem to figure out. They’re glad (except maybe for Tim) that they don’t have to go out into the storm to pank snow. What they don’t know is, that’s the easy part, if everything is working.
We take our tooks off to them. Sometime, every year, they are the reason we’re able to ‘Ski Freely’. Do so. Get out, please. It’ll do us all good. Z
