sunday sledding adventrues

On Sunday I took the snowmobile and headed south on the river, i.e. upstream to see if I could get to the outflow from Campbell Lake. It seems that the initial clearing of a single lane on the river has not continued and the “road” was quite drifted in. This did not stop an n older couple in a sub compact from driving about 5 kms down, saw them on their way out; from their tracks it didn’t appear that they had made it to their destination.

Further along I passed a second vehicle that had a parked with the owners using snowmobiles get firewood. After I passed the Gwich’in camp I came across one other vehicle, a 4x4 crew cab that was apparently trying to do the same thing I was. They had turned around and were exposing overflow on the ice – leaving tracks about 30cm deep full of water and slush. After passing them I came to the end of the plow line and decided to turn around as well as the amount of overflow was defiantly increasing and the snow off the plow line was deep enough to have good potential to get stuck in. the last bit of overflow was about 100m long and I had to full throttle through it twice – going and coming. Machine got coated as the water/ slush froze and mixed with the dry powder snow past the open water. Temp about -28 and very humid on the ice, as the “dust” kicked up by the snowmobile hung in the air for quite some time.

Lastly a couple of fake aurora shots - looks like northern lights but it isn't. Same phenomenon as sun pillars but at night - due to heavy ice fog refracting light upwards from the source

oh..and look, the sun is still up after 5 PM now