Late 1960’s – Winter

This story unfolded over a two week time period in the late 1960’s but I do not remember the specific year.  I remember my mother and father late one winter getting all of us off to school each day and then heading up Independence Pass to the area by Tagert Lake where the gates are located when the pass is closed for the winter.  From there they went up the pass on their snowmobiles or so I thought, with a trailer full of supplies in tow.  On the weekends the rest of us were invited to join them on their excursion up the pass.

As it turns out, what my father was up to was a feat in itself.  That particular winter Dwight Reeves, the caretaker at Grizzly Reservoir, as he would do every winter as spring approached, set out on the bulldozer to clear the avalanches that were blocking the various diversion ditches that fed into the reservoir.  These paths had to be cleared before the start of the melting season in order to ensure the water fed into the reservoir and not down the valley.  As it turns out this particular year, somehow the bulldozer went off track and slide off a bank.  There was no way for Dwight to get it out on his own and he did not have the luxury of time to wait for the snow to melt to get it out.

My father, who owned a local earth moving company, was contracted to get his equipment up to the stranded bulldozer to get it out.  Well, that was easier said than done and so begins this adventure.

The pass was still months from opening so my father was faced with driving his John Deere bulldozer up from the gate all the way to the reservoir and out onto the ditch to where theirs was stranded.  This was a distance of approximately 12 miles.  The first part of the trip, although time consuming, posed very little challenge or risk.  Once he reached Lincoln Creek Road, that was about to change.  On a good day my father was able to go approximately a mile but as he headed down Lincoln Creek his progress slowed.  The first part of the road got very little sunshine and the snow was extremely deep.  In order to clear his path he would have to make huge piles of snow on both sides of the road.  Once he got a few miles further the snow depths were not as big of an issue but now he faced crossing more than 18 avalanche paths many of which were ready to slide.  The trailer towed behind the snowmobile not only carried a day’s worth of fuel for the bulldozer but it also carried dynamite and a rocket launcher.  My parents communicated by using two-way radios but even that had to stop during blasting. 

After two weeks my father finally arrived at the stranded bulldozer and in less than a day had it back up on the road where it was needed.  The trip out took all of a day and a half.  For me, this meant I had two weekends in a row to do some really fun snowmobiling in an area that we did not often get to go.  The dynamite was fun too, but; my father never let me handle it or help fire it up into the cornices at the top of the paths.  A wise choice on his part, I guess.