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| In kids comic terms - "*&#@!" |
"Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be lynched", I took to be subtle Albertan humour and ignored (apologies for not getting a photo). We seemed fine going along here and got near to the first site. Of course it was behind the fence for a gas plant with big H2S warning signs, so I felt it sensible to scratch that one too. Clearly a very successful day. Last chance was a bit further along the road, and could be approached from what looked like a small gravel quarry with a nice secluded area to park. Secluded enough that I thought it worth the risk of possibly parking on someones land while we go and find the wetland. So one out of 6 there. Not good going. This all meant we had exhausted the days site list by 11.30. However, being a forward thinking individual, I had thrown in the sheet with the other 7 sites, just in case we finished early. How clever I am not. |
| Errr, it's getting deeper... |
door, and seeing that there wasn't any easy way out that way, I clambered over the drivers seat and out the other side to join Jeff. A quick walk around told us we were in a bit of a situation. The Jeep was deep in it, the nearest town is probably about 30km away, and we are 3km along a trail with no mobile reception, in the middle of the week when the trails are quiet and the sun is blazing down. Obviously the first thing you need to do in this situation is get the camera out and take a pic! I've posted these before, but it is funny, and not having taken any more I thought I'd post them here again. So. No panic. It doesn't help. It also doesn't help to get annoyed and think that it would have been better if I was doing the driving. It wouldn't. I would have gone through the middle and the whole jeep would have been swallowed! Best thing to do is start digging, and start trying to get traction behind the wheels. And quickly, because there seemed to be a bit of sinking going on. We did about an hour of this, but the logs seemed to just keep sinking below the wheels, and whatever we dug out quickly got replaced by other sloppy mud. It was also very hard to get any leverage to dig as the mud on the deep side was about waist deep. No success at all, just more sinking every time the wheels spun. Jeff volunteered to head back to the road to see if he could find some help, while I kept trying to sort out the problem. Very sensibly, he took his phone with him. Very sensibly, I also gave him my phone to double the chances of reception. Well, it seemed sensible until I thought that it would be good to be able to try to call him if I decided to leave the SUV as well. That thought was 10 minutes too late.
The only progress I made was to get muddier, so I gave up and went to site in a nearby river to clean my self up a bit. By this time Jeff had been gone for over an hour. Not being able to do anything useful at the Jeep, I went after Jeff. Now would be a good time to have a phone... The whole way along the 3km walk back to the road, I was hoping I would see Jeff in the passenger seat of a big Albertan truck, ready to go and pull us out. But no dice. I made it back to the road and thought I'd better wait there for a while before I made my next move. I remembered from an earlier trip out this way, that there was an ATV tour place about a kilometre further up the road, which might be a good place to find help. After 5 minutes of waiting though, Jeff appear riding on the back of a quad from that direction. Good man. He found help.
One of the benefits of getting ourselves into a whole heap of poo was meeting some very generous and thoroughly nice helpful people. Bonny from Hidden Trails Adventures (http://www.hiddentrailsadventures.com/) was the one giving Jeff a lift. She couldn't help us there and then, but she had called her husband and business partner Rob who would be back later and was better equipped to try and pull us out. Much relieved we walked back to the Jeep, to wait the estimated 4 hours until he would be back. Not much happened in this time, except a few more failed attempts to get ourselves out. But I did get Jeff's story of the search for help. Two people passed him on the road, one guy stopped, but he didn't have a tow rope and couldn't help. The other guy didn't stop. He had turned the opposite way from the ATV place, but there is a campground in that direction. Unfortunately everybody seemed to be away there. Still, nearby is an Army Cadet training centre. Now, you would think that great training for army cadets would be rescuing people from the wilderness, and that they'd have some quite useful equipment. Unfortunately they must be training army bureaucrats there, because he got told that everyone was too busy, and that all they could do was offer a phone to call a tow truck. Pathetic really. The quote from the tow truck place was $600, so quite rightly, Jeff went away in search of actual helpful people. This is when he headed back up the road and found the ATV place and met Bonny.
Well, after waiting from about 2pm to 6pm, I got impatient and decided to walk back out towards Hidden Trails Adventures site. Not that I was getting annoyed with people who were being kind enough to help! It was just getting quite late, and if for some reason they couldn't come and help us, we would have to start making some sort of attempt to get ourselves back to civilisation. I did manage to get a little phone reception during this walk and managed to send Amanda a picture of the Jeep, and teh message "We're in a bit of a situation". I had intended to expand, however, I met Rob shortly after, and got a free ride on a quad back to the Jeep. Much more fun than walking, but I kind of forgot I left a rather cryptic message with my girlfriend! So at around 7pm, we started trying to extract the jeep using a quad and it's 3000lb winch. After an hour of trying, we finally broke the winch and hadn't succeeded in budging the Jeep an inch. Which was a bit disheartening. The only thing left to do was go back to Hidden Trails and use their phone to call a tow truck. Although more importantly, call the girlfriend to say we are okay first! And secondly, call the boss to relay the tale of stupidity and hope she's not too angry! Hats off to both though, they were very supportive and didn't shout at all!
The tow truck was called at about 8pm, and they said they would send someone out, and it would be about $400. Great! A $200 saving!
We have to give a huge thanks to Bonny and Rob here. They took us in and fed us burgers (perfectly cooked), and lit a fire to keep us warm, and were very good company. It was worth getting into a bit of a disaster to meet them! Total legends. And we also have to apologise for stretching their work day into the hours of darkness.
Back to the tow truck. At about 10.30pm, the truck driver calls to say that he would rather not come out in the dark. Which I think is fair enough. But had he come out when we called, there would be an hour of light left to dig us out. It would maybe have been good of the tow truck company to say that there was a time limit on when their drivers would come out, so we had good notice of when it was too late, so we could make arrangements to get home. At 8pm there was maybe a small chance of imposing on our hosts to get us somewhere near barrier lake, but at 10.30, there was no chance we could ask them that. Rob still had an hours drive to get home, and he was due up at 6am the next day. Somehow I managed to convince the driver to come out anyway. So back to waiting. An hour later, the drivers boss called to say that he couldn't allow him to come out. Again, fine, but not very helpful to keep us waiting for nearly 4 hours before telling us we're stuck. To make things worse, I was told that they wouldn't be able to come out the following day, and we'd have to wait until friday morning. With much polite complaining, the tow truck boss person went away to see if there was anything she could do about getting someone out on the thursday. 15 minutes later we were told it's friday or nothing. Rather annoying. So we booked it in, and all we could do for getting a bed for the night was impose on Rob one more time to take us to Cochrane where we got a hotel room. Fortunately it was on his way home, so hopefully we didn't hold him up too much. So at least we got a shower, and by the time we got to bed it was 1.30am. That was a long long day!
There are a few legends in this story. The next one is Amanda, who had driven over to Calgary on Wednesday, to meet my mum at the airport. We were all due to meet on Thursday evening, to go to the stampede on Friday (which will likely be the next update). We needed a way to get back to the field centre on thursday, and my ever patient girlfriend was very kind to agree to picking us up from Cochrane at 8am on thursday morning. This even though she was woken at midnight with the request.
Legends that they are, May, Dhiraj, and Jeff managed to dig and pull the Jeep out after three hours of work. Many beers owed. Many thanks proffered. $400 saved. Now it looks fortunate that the tow truck place was useless!
The only other thing to note on this tale is that this is the same trail that killed the bikes a few weeks back. Taking the Jeep was meant to be simpler! I'm really starting to dislike that place. And I still have to go back to tick off those sites!
Fun times.
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