Blown out tire
As we were heading up Snoqualmie pass, a piece of metal flipped up from the road and tore a hole in the right rear tire. The car didn't go out of control and I thought a tire on the trailer had gone flat. I immediately pulled over to the right edge of the highway, but there wasn't much room. The side of the highway was plowed and carved into a vertical wall of snow. The rear tire was smoking. Kneeling in the slush in the one foot space between the side of the car and the wall of snow, I jacked up the vehicle and removed the wheel, and lowered the spare from underneath the car. The spare was flat! I put it on anyway, didn't really have a choice. I tossed the old tire on the trailer and we headed off at 3 mph driving on the shoulder pinned up against the wall of snow. I didn't want to ruin the spare or unseat the bead. It took us an hour to get to the first exit at the top of the pass, 3 miles away. Four quarters in the air pump at the Chevron pumped the tire up to 35 psi before the stingy pump decided we'd had enough air and cut off. The set of tires on the Suburban are from Costco. Carolyn checked the glove compartment and found the paperwork. The tires had a 60 month road hazard warranty and we had 7 months left on the warranty. She checked the hours for the Coeur d'Alene Costco and Google Maps said we could make it there by 8pm if we drove 70 mph the whole way. We blasted across eastern Washington on a leaky spare and pulled into Costco precisely at 8pm. I ran into the tire shop with my paperwork and no one was there. I had to track down the tire guy in another part of the deserted store. He looked at my papers, tapped on his computer, and came up with every excuse in the book why he couldn't help me: "You can't just replace one tire on a 4wd", "I don't have that tire in stock, it'll take 5 days to get one." In the end, even though we were surrounded by stacks and stacks of tires, he sent us away with nothing. We got some groceries and drove the rest of the way to Wallace and unloaded the car.
Paige's family in Barcelona
First an update on the kids because we're all in different places in the world this weekend. Paige, Chris, Fox, and Jane are in Barcelona.
Tanya and Eric at Lake Wenatchee
Eric and Tanya are up to the cabin for Valentine's Day weekend.
Allison and Tate in Beijing
Allison and Tate are in Beijing for six months teaching English.
Heading up to Mullan Pass
Ok, back to Wallace. On Friday, we planned to go skiing but it was a blizzard all day. The snow didn't ease off during the day and we never ventured out of the house, except to occasionally shovel off the walks. I notice the Wallace locals are very neighborly in keeping the sidewalks clear. Our next door neighbors have been clearing our portion of the sidewalk and walkway to our house when we're not there. That night we drove to Kellogg for Carolyn's favorite Mexican food for Valentine's Day. We woke up Saturday to clear skies and gathered our snowmobile gear and drove to the Shoshone County snowmobile parking lot past Mullan to head up into the mountains. The avalanche danger was high and I was wondering whether it'd be a bad idea to head out, but we planned to stay on the main groomed trails and not venture into the backcountry. The lot was nearly full with rigs from Washington and Idaho. We headed up the trail for Mullan Pass with the goal of reaching a warming hut on the Montana side of the border.
Beacon Light Mining Company, since 1953
We passed a turnoff to an old mine property, but we kept riding up to Mullan Pass.
Mullan Pass
After five miles we had climbed up to Mullan Pass. In this picture, Carolyn is down at the actual pass (tiny speck on the right), at the Idaho/Montana border. I followed the track of another snowmobile up to a turnaround point on this hill. I rode back down to Carolyn and we followed a trail to start down the Montana side of the pass. I had to turn around in the deep fresh snow. Our snowmobiles are made for trails, not deep snow, so I had to gun it to make it through the powder. All of a sudden my machine's motor cut out and wouldn't rev past 4,000 rpms, which wasn't enough to engage the torque converter and move. Before towing my sled back down the pass to the car, I tried the only thing I could do: change the spark plugs. The existing plugs were brand new, but the newer plugs worked and my machine ran fine after that. No way were we going to head down into Montana though, in case my machine decided to cut out again. We rode back down past the car and then headed up the old Northern Pacific route to Lookout Pass.
Riding the shoo-fly
We rode up to Lookout Pass. It was really fun because the snow was fresh and hadn't been moguled-out by previous sleds. We turned around at the pass and headed back down. On the way down we took a detour around the normal route of the railroad. When the railroad was blasting a deep cut through the mountain, they built a temporary trail around the cut so they could move men and materials around the obstruction. A temporary route like this is called a shoo-fly.
The route below the shoo-fly
The old rail route turns back below us and goes under I-90 before looping back down toward Mullan.
Shoo-fly on left. Rail route through cut on right
Tom
Carolyn took this picture. I don't know what I was doing, but it must have been something good.
GPS route of ride
The left track is the route up to Mullan Pass. The right track is the route up to Lookout Pass. The ski resort is easily visible. Our ride was 30+ miles.
Bitterroot Cafe
We stopped in Mullan for sandwiches at the Bitterroot Cafe.
John and Natalie's house
We spent Sunday at church and then went for a walk up to John and Natalie's house to check it inside and out to make sure the furnace was working, nothing was leaking, etc.
View of Wallace from Pearl Street
We walked up Pearl Street with Gypsy and took a picture of the town.
Shoveling off the garage
It continued to snow Sunday night and Monday. I shoveled the snow off the garage roof so it wouldn't collapse. At this point the snow turned to rain.
Snowmobile parking at power sub-station up past Burke
After lunch I convinced Carolyn it wouldn't be raining up at Burke. She didn't think sledding while it was snowing would be very fun but she was willing to give it a try. The road up to the substation was completely snowed over and I thought we'd be the only ones crazy enough to try and pull a trailer up there. I was wrong. There were a lot of others already up there. The power substation receives its power from a set of high tension lines that lead over Cooper Pass down to the hydro power station at Thompson Falls, MT. From this substation, an old topo map shows the lines heading down Burke Canyon and feeding all of the old mines. From there the lines head over a ridge to feed the mines in Canyon Creek and then down the Silver Valley all the way to Kellogg, ending at a zinc plant at the Bunker Hill mine that produced pure zinc from electrolysis. The zinc plant is long gone, so I'm not sure where the power is going. However, the substation and all the lines all the way to Thompson Falls were rebuilt and replaced last summer.
Carolyn
We wanted to ride to Lower Glidden Lake but when we reached the point where the trail to the lake turned off from the main route, the trail was completely buried in fresh snow. I didn't want to head out there and get stuck. We ended up turning around and heading back. It was really fun riding in those conditions.
Lots of snow
Route of up to Lower Glidden Lake turnoff and back
When we arrived home, I took a look at the spare tire on the car to see if looked like it was still holding air and would make it home to Redmond. I saw air bubbles leaking out around the stem. So that's how it went flat. I called an independent tire dealer in Kellogg and told them the problem. They asked for the tire brand and size and went out to look for something that would fit. The tire guy called me back a few minutes later and said they had a used tire with about 70% tread. I drove to Kellogg to get the tire fixed. While I was in the waiting area, I talked to an older gentleman who spent his career as a miner at the Galena mine near Wallace. I asked him question after question and he had long answers. He loved talking about what it was like to work underground. The tire store replaced my ruined tire and fixed the spare. We were ready to head back the next day.
Plowing the cabin driveway
We left Wallace around noon on Tuesday, stopping as usual in Coeur d'Alene for gasoline and Cafe Rio. While it snowed in Wallace most of the time we were there, it was also snowing in the Cascades, too. We drove across Washington at a more reasonable speed this time. Carolyn kept her eye on the Snoqualmie Pass traffic website. Shortly after passing Moses Lake, the website announced the pass was closed in both directions. Carolyn checked Stevens Pass and it was still open. We detoured off the freeway and up the Columbia River to Wenatchee and then up through Leavenworth for the Stevens Pass. When we neared the turnoff to Lake Wenatchee, traffic slowed to a crawl. Stevens Pass also closed to traffic. We drove to the cabin to spend the night and wait for the pass to open. It had been snowing at Lake Wenatchee, too, and we noticed that few of the driveways were plowed. When we got to our driveway, it was completely blocked by a berm 4' high and 8' deep from the snowplows plowing snow along the highway. There was no way the two of us could manually dig through that berm and dig out the driveway to park the Suburban and snowmobile trailer. Carolyn called the family that plows our driveway in the winter. We parked the car a couple of blocks away in a cleared intersection. The woman who answered the phone said she'd send her son out to our place. A few minutes later he arrived on a front end loader and within 5 minutes had cleared the driveway and a spot for the snowmobile trailer. I gave him a large tip. When we were at the cabin 3 weeks ago, there wasn't a flake of snow on the ground.
Trailer parked in the cleared spot
Path to shed for motorcycle
I forgot to mention that we brought Eric's motorcycle home from Wallace on the snowmobile trailer. Eric wants to practice riding to warm up for this year's Dirty Face Dual Sport event. Now that we were at the cabin, we planned to leave the snowmobiles there. What to do about the motorcycle? We couldn't leave it out in the snow or strapped to the trailer. I wanted to put it in the shop building to keep it safe until the next time we come to the cabin with the truck. Getting the motorcycle into the shop would require digging a 200' trench through 3' of snow. By now it was dark, still snowing, and I had all the outside lights on. It was fun digging in the snow out there. Once the path was dug, Carolyn helped me get the motorcycle down off the trailer into a spot I had cleared in the snow. Then I rode the motorcycle through the trench with the tire spinning furiously up to the shop. Carolyn helped push it the final few feet up the ramp through the door.
View of the snow around the cabin in the morning
We had a great time at the cabin. Normally the cabin takes a long time to warm up, but since Eric and Tanya had been there a few days earlier, it was still pretty warm. When we went to sleep that night, Stevens Pass was still closed. In the middle of the night I checked the pass website and it said the pass would be closed until avalanche work was complete and that wouldn't begin until 6am.
View of the trench
On Wednesday at 7am the website said the pass was open. We packed up the car and shut down the cabin.
Pile of snow
The pile of snow from the driveway is probably 12' high. We left around 7:30am. It was a much slower drive over the pass than usual because of the amount of snow on the road. Coming down the western side, the traffic in the other lane heading up to the ski resort was solid. When we got home, I drove into work. After work I stopped by Costco with the old tire. The nice tire guy came out and looked at my replacement tire. He said it looked good. He measured the tread left in the popped tire and gave me $180 back. What a deal! I would have been satisfied with $20.
It was a fun trip to Wallace and to the cabin.
