Part One
Dogs or snow machines?
Yukon trapper Steve Paconi, with his wife Carol, trapped this area with their dog team (and a cat!). That was during a time when trapping was still lucrative, up till the 1980s. Their doghouses were built out of logs, and a few of them were still half-standing when we took over this trapline.
Dogs needed to get along, needed booties and medicine and food and, once in a while, a kind word and a belly rub.
Our snow machines nearly need the same. To get along with one, I first have to figure out how to ride it: “she” needs skis; and sometimes (not very often) quick start—then fuel instead of kibbles, and oil instead of a belly rub.
Trees and snow machines don’t mix
Twenty-two years ago I got my first snow machine, a Ski-Doo Tundra R. I didn’t learn easily and drove her into trees, more often than not. Snow vehicles have come a very long way since then, and so have I. Now I’m riding a Ski-Doo Tundra LT and, no, I don’t bump into trees anymore. But let’s tell you about what could break (or did for us) on our carriages, and not about my steep learning curve.
Our workhorse is a snow machine
One time, our old and heavy snow machine’s steering broke, due to having been driven up onto a tree stump that was not visible under the snow. We had to tie both skis together in order to ride on. She was sure a workhorse, having had to endure a tree falling on her, but luckily the tree just crushed the tool box in the back.
We’ve had a sporty snow machine that we’ve used for many years to break trail with. Always, when we get home and park, we lift the back end up with a come-along attached to the rafter, so that the track is off the ground. Then we start her up again and hit the throttle one more time, to have the snow fly out from under the machine. One time there was a loud bang … Turns out the track ripped apart very cleanly!
We took her out with the boat in the summer; then, after having put on a brand-new track at the mechanic’s, we loaded her up again to be brought back to camp. But wait … trying to ride the machine off the skidder (the snow machine is being wiggled off the boat and onto the skidder, then pulled to camp by ATV), I heard a regular click-banging noise. The spring on one side got put in backwards and it was scraping and bumping along the track. This one, thankfully, was easy to fix in camp.
The sporty machine was a second-hand purchase, too, and it had quite a few problems in its lifetime. The highlight was when the clutch gave out. She’d still ride, though, so after turning around, Paul slowly made it back to camp. We went online to learn how to fix the clutch, which was explained fairly decently by watching YouTube videos. We took the clutch out and apart to learn what spare parts we needed to order … It turned out we needed quite a few!
The problem with fixing something in camp is that neither Paul nor I are light-duty learned mechanics. I like to take a lot of photos or even videos—or, write each step down when taking something apart so that we can then put it back in the right order. Otherwise, you’d end up with not enough screws or bolts, or you’d have some left over, like when you purchase a piece of furniture from IKEA (just kidding, I love IKEA). And when there’s something left over, then there’s always that nagging feeling and this worrisome thought: I just hope that piece stays put, will work just fine and not break something else entirely!
Electric starters are wonderful. You press the button and—Vwroom!—she comes to life. Forty kilometres from camp, the starter quit—so we grabbed that manual and found out how to start her by hand.
It’s always a good idea to have the emergency starter rope, with a starter clip, with you. But then, the starter clip broke, too. We had to make one ourselves. I still remember vividly that we got toasty warm (at -30 degrees C), having wrapped that rope around the drive pulley numerous times and trying to pull on it quickly (in the manual it’s called a “crisp pull”) so that the motor would turn over. It’s not a fun undertaking on a bitter-cold morning. One starts sweating and once one is on the way, the question is how fast does that sweat dry so that one won’t get chilled to the bone.
Open landscape
You’re riding through an open landscape, which is wonderful, of course, with nothing in the way to stop your progress. But you’d still want to see landmarks in order to find your trail again after a very heavy snowfall. We’ve had this problem the first two years of our working that line, trying to break trail for 220 kilometres, from the highway to our northern-most line cabin.
Back then, we didn’t have a GPS device yet, instead we carried printed and laminated 1:50,000 maps. A very beautiful sight was the northern lights on one very cold winter night. It was, otherwise, pitch black and Paul was trying to find the trail (we were on our winter road but it had snowed a lot in the open sections) by way of these maps.
The headlights on snow machines 20 years ago weren’t that bright yet, so we also used headlamps. Eventually, Paul found the previously-packed trail and we were back in action (I enjoyed the greens and purples of the aurora borealis while waiting), only to arrive at the caved-in wall tent (all that snow was too much for the thick linen tent). The dog would right away curl into a ball and go to sleep. We, on the other hand, had to shovel the white, heavenly “offering” out of the way and put the tent up again.
Totally exhausted, it was by that time morning; we drank a few litres of hot tea and broth, then we all happily fell asleep for eight hours in the (by then) warm tent, then repeated drinking liquids and going back to sleep.
A quarter century ago, snow machines were in their infant states: my Tundra R seemed not to be working the way she should, losing power. I can’t remember properly anymore, but she was so slow-going that we ended up towing her back to the highway.
At the mechanic’s we were told there is a jet in there that could be exchanged for another one that’s built for higher altitudes. The trail from the highway to our trapline’s border indeed offers up some elevation changes. And new machines are built differently now, so the manufacturers probably did away with the jets. She lost power at another time, too, and when checking her, we saw that a little rubber hose, maybe for air, had gotten disconnected.
Now when I see smoke emitting from the carriage, I think of explosions, too. Rather worrisome, right? Did something come off and is it smouldering on some hot piece of equipment under the hood? That one time it was the engine-temperature heat sensor that got itself toasted.
Sonja Seeber, Yukon trapper
