This is it

And the world is white once again.  If my intuition and experience are pointing me in the right direction, this snow is here to stay until spring breakup.  It's just in time, too...

I've had one heck of a time up here on the mountain.  First, I stupidly cracked the case on our bigass water pump when the temperature precipitously plummeted one night.  I had pulled the pickup hose but didn't leave the cap off.  Ooops.  So the pump was broken when we had a nice thaw where I could have topped everything off with water.  First strike.

The second strike came when I was hauling 80 gallon loads of water up the mountain from our lovely spring, and realized that the trailer frame was busted nearly in half at the midline hitch attachment.  And I don't know how to weld, yet.  Sigh.  It gets worse.

Strike three came in rapid succession when the big generator seized up before I started milking the first goat in the morning.  Having no generator makes it tough to weld, even if you know how.  Ouch.

So I called in reinforcements.  Ben had a few down days in hunting camp, because our early mountain goat and brown bear hunters limited out quickly.  Home he came to the rescue.  Since the weather forecast wasn't good he didn't fly over the top of the Chugach Range, but instead drove the big box van over Thompson Pass and snaked his way home on the road system.

By that time, I had the pump repaired but it never warmed up again... and it won't either.  It turned out that the trailer was not easily repairable- and is too much of a project to take on right now.  He picked up a used one in town and it's working out better than any trailer we've ever had.  The generator has a badly stuck valve and may or may not be fixable... in addition to the failed low oil shut-off.  We put it out next to the nearly identical model in the yard, so sometime when we're not so busy they can be combined into one.  

And the new generator is pretty awesome.  But, it has a problem with our milkhouse wiring for some unknown and incomprehensible reason.  We had to drill a hole in the wall and run extension cords out to the generator shed to make everything work.  

Then, when we jacked up the 4 wheeler to put on chains for the inbetween season we realized that the front wheel bearings are out.  So now I'm really, really happy that snow is here and the easy season for off-road travel is here.  Just in time.  I'll be starting up a snowmachine this morning to blow the cobwebs out.  I'd like to see another foot of snow before I really put it to work, but it's great to know that's right around the corner.