Firetower..........almost.

Well, today was spectacularily lame. After planning for months to spend the night in a firetower with our friend Tomas, who is visiting from Chicago, we failed to reach the summit. The deep snow proved too much for our expidition specific, wide track, wide ski, monster torque snowmobile. I am guessing that most of the fault lies with the operators of said vehicle. After making it 9 out of 10 miles, dumping and recovering the sled 6 times and totally digging out twice we were turned back by the untracked, deep last quarter mile. The last time the sled bogged we spent almost 45 minutes just turning the thing around in waist deep snow.

I am not really sure what we were thinking when we set out on the adventure. The plan was to load down the sled and Tomas and I would ride up first with the dog and drop off the supplies. I would then head back down, pick up Mulv and head back up for the evening. Needless to say Mulv was a little shocked to see us both return two hours later. We should have known better seeing as 1) I have never used a snowmobile; 2) Tomas used one ten years ago in his Grandpas yard; 3) Our destination was high in the remote back country; 4) Mulv has never used a snowmobile; 5) It had been dumping snow for the last week and all good trails had been buried under new snow.

This could have been a cheesy montage in a Sledneck movie about the idiots who want to go snowmobiling in the backcountry and think it's as easy as watching a video. I was a little embarrassed about calling the rental place back three hours later and telling them they could come pick up the sled. The nice thing is that the guys were super nice and made us feel better by telling stories of their past failures (I think they were lying). They refunded our second day and the owner even said to call back if we got the tower again and he said he would get us up there on the shops dime. Something he didn't have to do and he will definately get my business again.

I think the next attempt at the tower will be in the summer with ATVs.

Check out the shot of the overly optomistic idiots with their dog on the snowmobile. (We were also running over our water supply for the weekend. IDIOTS.)