Solo Trip to the Cabin… and the Trail Was Blocked!

The snow machine gets tucked away at the end of every winter, sitting under a tarp all summer until it's time for the first run of the season. We never really know if it's going to start, but luckily it did. He loaded up what he needed for a quick solo weekend at the cabin. I stayed home this time because I had a ton to catch up on, but honestly, knowing Ollie, I knew he'd find some kind of adventure anyway. He made the drive out toward Talkeena and I'm really glad he left early. The daylight disappears fast now and going in at night would have been a whole different challenge. Everything looked pretty good at first. Light snow, cold air, just a quiet start to winter. But like I said, the first snow machine trip always comes with surprises. Winter in Alaska definitely has arrived. We don't have a lot of snow yet, but we do have snow. And the temperatures are down to about 24 degrees here in Talkeena at the parking lot. We've got everything loaded. We're geared up, ready to go. Thank you for tuning in again and supporting our channel. It's going to be the first snow machine ride this winter. I got the snow machine fired up at the homestead, made sure everything is working good, everything's looking good. So hopefully with a little bit of luck, we get to the cabin here. It's going to be about an hour and a half of a ride. It is about seven, oh no, excuse me. It is already 8.15. It doesn't seem like it. Seems like it's six or five in the morning. It's pitch black still. But I think in the next half hour, 40 minutes, we're going to see the sunrise slowly and we get a little bit more light going through the woods. Let's hit the trail and enjoy our ride. Well, this is the end of the trail here. Dang it. Look at this tree here. Yeah, there's no way we can get around this one because the snow is not exactly deep enough to take a chance and reroute, go down here and around. I'm going to get stuck for sure. Luckily, we're not too far from the cabin, so I'm going to grab my stuff, what I need to get, and then bring the chainsaw, come back, cut this tree up and here's the trail. Cut this tree up, move it to the side and on we go. Well, if the tree is still good enough, we might as well just cut it up in smaller pieces and take it to the cabin for firewood. I have a feeling Pippin's already at the cabin, waiting to go upstairs into her little bed. Oh boy, there's another one. We must have had some pretty good wind up here. Yeah, this is another one we need to cut up. So this is going to take a while before we get the snow machine to the cabin. Oh my goodness, I'm glad I didn't take off last night. When you get off work, drive all the way up here, come out here on the snow machine, you're getting kind of tired and you run into something like this. It's a little bit of a different story. Check out this branch here. It's literally upside down, stuck in the snow. I don't know where it's holding it. See the very top, snapped off, dropped and it's just stuck here. Well, we've got some work to do. What do you think, Pippin? Oh, it's beautiful. Winter wonderland. Let's check out the sauna. All looking good. And we'll check, make sure we've got fuel and oil. No, we need fuel. So let's get the fuel and oil. probably because of moisture, because it is very moist today. So it probably froze up. So there is a way of doing it inside the snow machine under the cowling. There's a an emergency start where you, I think it's a rope you pull around the flywheel and you can manually pull it with that. So hopefully that works out or I'll just fiddle a little bit with it and hopefully it starts up. Well, we've got this section cleared. I'm going to try a couple more minutes. If it doesn't work, we'll get the trail cleared before I do anything with the snow machine. And once it runs, hopefully it runs, then we'll go all the way to the cabin. So let's see if this works. I wrapped this string around the, I don't know what it's even called, the flywheel or. Yeah, I think it's the flywheel and pull on it. I got it ready for start. So let's see if we can get it to work. Get it to work. Well, try this again. I think it's going to work. Just got to get ready. Kill switch is down now, so I'm not going to fire this thing up. I've got my hands in there. Well, I'm glad it's not 9 p.m. That's for sure. I'm going to pull a little bit harder So I did one mistake. I wrapped the string around the flywheel the wrong way. I was going in the opposite direction the way it's supposed to go. That's why we had a misfire in the beginning. It just kind of clicked in my head. I switched the rope around, pulled once, fired up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go to this cabin and get settled in. Well, I have to laugh. That wasn't too bad. Only took five and a half hours to get here. All right, Pip, let's go inside and get a fire started, huh? Yeah, before we do anything, let's get a fire started, get warmed up. Or at least, I'm pretty warm right now, get the cabin warmed up so it feels nice and cozy later. She's already on the way up. Okay, we got 19 degrees, so it's about minus eight Celsius. Yeah, I should have brought a gallon of water. I thought we'd get out here without a problem and then just grab the water jacks, go down to the spring and do that a little later. Let's get some water, huh? Wow, we must have had a pretty bad storm. This is my trail going down to the spring. And look at this monster of a tree. Wow, smashed right into the other ones. It's already almost one o'clock p.m. and about four o'clock, being so cloudy, it's going to be pretty dark. So I would love to kind of hang out inside the cabin a little bit, warm up, because I got kind of damp on the inside. I was sweating pretty bad and snow on the outside. I feel a little whooped right now. I could take a little break, but then, like I said, it's going to be dark outside and it's going to make it a little more tricky to do anything. So I'm kind of debating if I should just finish my tier, get some water heated up, in the meantime, for some coffee and then just get something done before it gets dark. And you know what? I forgot all my meat. I had everything ready in the freezer last night, but I didn't want to pull it out yet. And then this morning I was a little bit in a hurry to get out the door and I left all my meat. So all I have is I had one chicken we picked up from Costco the other day and a little bit of smoked ham. That's all I have. Chicken is gone and half the smoked ham is also gone because I was so hungry. So all what I have left basically is just bread and peanut butter with honey. So maybe, maybe I'm going to check out the lake later and see if the ice is thick enough. It should be. And drill a hole and put the fishing pole in the water. And maybe if I'm really lucky today, which I doubt, but maybe I'll catch a fish and have some fish for dinner. We'll see. So here's going to be our first project this weekend. So what I want to do is here I'm going to take the light bulb out and then the fixture and try to get a hole through the outside wall. And then we're going to run a cable from in here out to the exterior. And we're going to get this light fixture figured out to where we have power to it. And that means we have light outside here because it's always been an issue. We have all the lights on inside, but we don't really have a light for the outside. When you have to go to the outhouse or you want Should work. I don't think it's a motion detector. I think it's a light detector. So I might just take this off because I don't want this thing to go on and off all the time. Okay, there we go. Let's see. So it's motion, not light. All right. Well, we'll see how this works out in there because I don't want this thing to turn off when you're out here and you don't move a whole lot and then it keeps going on and off. So maybe I need to just tape this over this strip right here. Or it actually may work quite well. So let's just give it a try. But at least we got power to it. So that's good. We got it working. Oh, wow. The mountain's coming out too. It's clearing up. It's amazing when you don't have any options because you forgot to have food, what you can create. So I had to make something. I got some spinach, eggs, garlic, and I put one little bit of one cube of chicken broth in it just to give it some flavor. And then I got some potatoes, Let's get back to the cabin and keep working on this handrail. Okay, we got them all in. Every single one. Well, guys, thanks for coming along, tuning in, supporting our channel and watching this video. Time for me to go back home and we'll see you guys on the next one. Bye, guys. A few surprises on the trail, a little work around the cabin, and the first snow of the season. The cabin's ready, waiting quietly for the next trip. Thank you guys so much for watching and we hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.