Yukon bush life

(Lou, Vancouver Airport) A girl’s dream has come true! I’ve often thought, when paying some mechanic for work on my car, I bet I’m getting fleeced here. I wish I knew more about engines. Well, piece by piece, I’m learning how a two-stroke engine works. Three days before we leave for England and one day before we have to take our very large husky, an impossible amount of laundry and various other things to town, the bloody Polaris Widetrak broke down again. It exploded in spectacular style with toxic luminous green coolant spraying out from under the hood like a psychedelic geyser. It is, I now know, simply a broken belt on the water pump that we can easily replace. If we had one. And if we weren’t leaving the country imminently. We had to get to town early the next morning and so abandoned it. In fact, we were quite tempted to leave the damn thing to go out with the ice in spring break up Thank God we had our little ’94 Polaris Indy Lite, Piccolo. We set of...

(Lou, Yukon) After a brief but glorious period of mobility we are stuck again. We had our second snowmachine, Piccolo, for almost two weeks before we broke it. We had just undertaken our longest journey of the winter so far on it, visiting friends who also live out in the bush. Big glacial mess We’d cut a new trail to circumvent the local glacier. The creek has not stopped overflowing and the glacier looks like a rather uninspiring ice sculpture plonked in a moat of slushy water. Our new trail forms a near vertical ramp down the bank then a rough ride over a pressure ridge and out onto the river. We weren’t sure we’d make it back up but the moat might have frozen in a couple of days, and if not we had ropes and a winch and could spend a tedious few hours pulling the whole damn lot up on our way back. Trying to get up the ramp on foot We decided Neil would ride down, then stop before the pressure ridge so we could knock out some of the worst ice chunks with an axe...