It was bad enough Robert falling into the ditch and breaking a stub shaft, but his Jeep had to get winched out by a Suzuki.
We had a pretty good trip on Sat. Made good time most of the day. We cut and/or winched about 10 trees out of the way. Ran Robert's chain saw out of gas. We had about a dozen rigs, and went up Freeway Ridge and then Black Gulch most of the way up. Then we split into two groups and while the rest went on further we cut off and headed on a route over to Evans Flat. Right after we split up Robert fell in the big washout and broke a stub shaft, but he just 3 wheeled it the rest of the way so we didn't pull it apart to repair. Closer to Evans Flat we found a pretty good washout which we couldn't drive over, and it was about 4-5 ft deep. A couple of us went around it to the bottom, then we cut a big section of a downed tree and were able to roll it into the hole to help fill it in, and piled a bunch of branches into it hoping someone in a quad wouldn't come along and fall into it. A few of the guys were able to drive across carefully after we sort of filled it in. Robert tried it and just barely slipped in, then had both tires fall off the log backing up, so he had to winch out. We hit a few deeper snow drifts at the top before dropping down to Evans, so there was a little more winching. We got to Evans around 3:30-4:00. We kids had snow ball fights and we all sat and ate something before heading out down Rancheria. We hit a pretty big tree down across Rancheria, and we were out of fuel for the chain saw, so we had to figure out how to get around it, which wasn't easy and took awhile. We still made it home with plenty of time before dark.
The other group went a little further up Black Gulch before heading towards Evans, and also cut a bunch of trees. They ended up crisscrossing our route and never made it to Evans, where we were going to try to meet, and ended up south of Evans. They went on down, back to Black Gulch, and then back down Freeway Ridge. The weather was great, we got a lot of work done, did some good wheeling, and hung out with good friends. Pretty good day.
Posted: April 17th, 2011, 9:03 am
