Yukon bush life

(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...

(Lou, Yukon) The emotional rollercoaster we’ve been riding on our broken down snowmachine took a couple of stomach-churning turns this week. We fixed our machine! All by ourselves! (With only a little bit of help from just about everyone in a hundred mile radius.) Then we managed to break it again before we got it running! Superb. How did we manage this amazing feat? We went to town last week on a borrowed Skidoo to collect our new snowmachine, a 1993 Polaris 340 (or Piccolo as we’ve named him.) The new part we needed to fix our machine, a coupler, was there at the PO (along with a very welcome parcel of gin and chocolate.) We waited for it get above -30 before going to fit the coupler as our disabled machine was still two miles away out on the trail. It didn’t. We went anyway as we wanted to return the Skidoo our Alaskan pals had lent us. The new coupler fitted beautifully. We got her running but she just wasn’t happy, smoking and backfiring, now what? Ah, very si...

(Lou, Yukon) Driving a snowmachine, it’s hard to know what’s happening to the rider following you. Two-stroke engines whine at ear-splitting pitch and your head’s muffled in fur, ear defenders, goggles, hood. You wrench your neck round, keeping your thumb on the throttle, and snatch a glimpse of their headlight to be sure they’re still there. Often you only see the back of your hood. So it’s a sign of how bad things got that I could hear Neil screaming Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! from 20 yards behind me. Yesterday goes down as one of our worst journeys. Another one. For the past week we’d been riding an emotional rollercoaster on our broken-down snowmachine. We must have involved everyone in a 100 mile radius in the saga. Homer helping with diagnostics from between Neil's legs Both our Alaskan friend and a pal in town had the spare part we needed. They got those parts to the Rangers who were headed to us, breaking trail for the Yukon Quest dogsled race. Preparing for the...