Cindy Purcell
our correspondent in the wilderness
Snow Mo on Patrol
Monday, Mar 1, 2004 (04:29
PM)
After eight straight days of rain and snow, the sun came out today. Chuck and I head up to the high country of Zion to do a backcountry snowmobile patrol, check on a backcountry ranger cabin, and measure the snow depth. This isn’t just a fun snowmobile trip -- these are big, noisy, air-polluting machines, a tool of the job and our only transportation in this part of the park. With all the new snow, I'm sure that we'll be digging out one of these machines sometime during the day.
We unload at the bottom of Maloney Hill, where a gate and road sign warns of winter travel restrictions. From this gate, the road is not plowed and travel is restricted to snowmobiles only.
| The Road in Winter, Unplowed |
Our snowmobiles weigh about 650 pounds each. It's no easy task to dig and haul one of these beasts out of the snow if we get stuck. In fact, the last time Chuck and I did a snowmobile patrol up here, we both got stuck and it took us two hours to get out of the holes we dug. On the other hand, the sky is bright blue today and the new snow has cast a fresh glaze on the trees and red rocks all around us. We haven’t seen this much sun in a week. So we grab our packs, our shovels and our snowshoes and head up the road.
One of our goals is to get to the Lava Point Ranger cabin and check on the status of the roof. The recent snow storms have brought enough heavy snow that it may have damaged the cabin. Most of the way up the road we are following another set of snowmobile tracks so the going is easy. Once we pull off the road to get to the backcountry cabin, we are breaking new ground. The trick to keeping these heavy machines on top of the snow is speed. You have to be fast at moving from side to side, to weight the skis and steer the machine. There is a small drainage we must cross before climbing the last hill to the cabin. Chuck has to slow down to cross the drainage, and loses the momentum to climb the hill. His snowmobile starts to sink. Before he gets completely buried, he stops. I see this happening so I stop before the drainage and get off the machine to help.
As soon as I step down into the snow, my leg sinks in up to my hip, about four feet. Without the snowshoes, I wouldn’t be able to move very far. In about an hour, the two of us pack down a snowshoe path up the hill toward the cabin. Then we dig out the stuck snowmobile and Chuck is able to drive it out of the hole and up the hill. I follow and we finally get to the backcountry cabin.
The good news is that the cabin is still standing. The bad news is that we have about four feet of snow on the roof that we need to shovel off. The snow near the cabin measures 46 inches in the sun, 72 inches in the shade. The little red barn near the cabin is completely covered and looks like a hobbit house.
We climb up on the roof and start shoveling. Three hours later, we are finally finished. Now we head back down the road to the truck and trailer and then back to the main canyon. I’m feeling tired, hungry and sore but happy to have spent the day out in the backcountry, in the sunshine and in the snow.
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Cindy Purcell
