If you look at just the photo, you’d think we had a great day. Because we mostly did.
Except.. I decided to tow the covered trailer up to give us just a little protection if bad weather came about. That acted like a giant anchor on the solid ice dirt road, and left me stuck in a horrible spot, hill on one side, edge on the other. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t control the trailer in reverse.
After a while we got to a point my brother could sneak his dodge past me. We strapped up, but the ice was so bad he couldn’t hardly move himself up the hill. We both aired down. Doubled the straps for length, and tried and tried. Nothing. It was very frustrating as competent men to not be able to move. On the ‘one last try’ pull we somehow finally got moving. I bet we spent more than an hour moving 100 yards.
We got situated and started my sage piles on fire. There was a slight wind blowing away from where we parked, so I lit the side closest to us and it did a great job of helping the fire blow into the pile more as it burned.
But about an hour in, the wind changed and started blowing towards us. The fires were now being blown back towards the burned stuff, and really slowed down. They never really finished, and just smoldered. At dawn we started covering them with snow.. but the smoldering was so far under the ash and dirt, it didn’t seem to be helping much. We stayed for a couple hours trying to get the snow to mix. My wife and kids were frozen and hungry. I took them home and grabbed a side-by-side with a snowplow on it.
It’s now 5 AM the next day and I am still up here trying to put these stupid fires out. Being as it is Sunday on Christmas Eve, like heck I’m going to find a place that will rent a tractor so that I can turn these piles over.
Needless to say, I will not be doing stash pile fires ever again.