May 4, 2010

I made my million.  It happened rather unceremoniously on Saturday.  I didn’t even have a camera to take my picture.  I completely forgot about it until Kris asked me how close I was on a lift ride halfway through the day.  I did some quick math and determined that I was only a couple of runs away.  I don’t know if skiing a million vertical feet in a season is a significant accomplishment.  I am sure I have never skied that much before and there is a good chance I never will again.  It does have a nice ring to it, a million vertical feet.

When you break it down, it took me 67 days to get there at an average of just over 15,000 feet per day.  15,000 can be an easy day or a hard day, depending on how you ski it.  Our biggest day for the season was 27,000.  Our shortest was only 6,000.  The most common lift that we ride gains just over 1400 feet so it would take over 700 lift rides.  My fastest top to bottom run was 3:15.  A million vertical feet at that speed would still take over 22 hours of skiing.  Add in the lift rides, and it would take almost six days of nonstop top to bottom laps at full speed.  I guess a million is at least a reasonable accomplishment.

The skiing on Saturday was quite fun.  We didn’t go down until late afternoon because the temperature up top was below freezing when we checked the snow report.  I suspect the snow was warmer than the air, though, because it was pretty slushy when we got there.  We probably had the wrong skis for the conditions which meant we probably made too many turns.  My back has been a little sore since then.  I am glad we didn’t ski Sunday, although it was tempting. 

Instead we worked on getting ready for our first outing in the trailer.  Kris worked on a sewing project, making us some laundry bags.  I organized the van and fixed the wiring.  I wanted to verify my fix, so we hauled a little bit of stuff over to the trailer as well.  We took that opportunity to introduce the cat to the van and the trailer.  She seems to like the trailer.  It has lots of windows.  I think she could do without the van ride. 

My first attempt at a wiring fix solved all the old problems, but created a new one.  As an electrical engineer, you would think I could explain this one, but it still makes little sense to me.  The turn signals were working on the proper sides before, but actually reversed themselves without changing the wires.  I have read that a bad ground can make the turn signals work backward and since I had no ground the first time, they must have been working backward – which was actually the right way because I had the wires backward.  When I fixed the ground, the lights flipped.  It turns out that the wiring diagram I was provided with the van plug I installed was a mirror image of the correct installation.  They were showing me the trailer end, not the truck end, even though I only bought the truck end.  Upon closer inspection, the instructions were at least ambiguous, so I could have caught it had I read more closely.  Regardless, it is always a relief when everything is working perfectly, especially the electric brakes.

For our first trip, we took an hour ride north to Palmer to a fairly normal commercial campground with full hookups.  It basically looks like a field of closely spaced campsites right next to a busy highway, although it isn’t crowded at all since it is early May. 

We wanted full hookups to really have the flexibility to test all of our systems.  Buying a trailer in November without testing any of the equipment feels a little risky, and even storing a trailer through an Alaskan winter seems likely to generate some problems.  I already knew that the previous owner had some winterization problems since both the outside shower and the inside one had frozen and cracked.  He purchased new heads, but I was concerned that I could have other plumbing problems.  My fears appeared to be realized when water started gushing out all over the place, but it turned out to just be open valves on the outside shower.  Once I closed that up, the system was tight.

We have checked out almost all of the systems now.  The only things I can think of that I haven’t checked are running the refrigerator on propane and dumping the holding tanks.  Most systems are now pretty idiot proof.  You only need to flip a switch.  The old days of lighting pilots are over.  I suspect the familiarity that was lost with the constant fiddling results in an easy revenue stream for the service companies, but if there is any reliability to these systems, I may never need to decide if I want to try to fix a problem on my own.  We did have a glitch in the heating system last night.  It failed to relight at one point and the trailer got pretty cool.  A quick reset got it going again.  Hopefully it was just a little air in the propane lines from the refill and not a reliability issue that will have me waking up cold on a routine basis.

Camping like this is not the least bit like roughing it.  Life is indistinguishable from being at home.  I am warm and comfortable.  I have TV and the internet.  I have tons of unused storage space at this point.  Although we only packed for a two night trip, it isn’t hard to imagine most of our stuff fitting in this trailer.  With the slide opened up, it seems downright spacious.  It also really makes it feel like two distinct rooms instead of one long hallway.

The rig hauled adequately.  I didn’t experience any sway and even our poor road conditions with two tire swales built by thousands of studded tires felt less scary than in our small car.  The van doesn’t feel peppy, but it gets things going.  It does want to shift back and forth between third and fourth at 65 mph on a slight upgrade, but the shifting of that heavy duty transmission is so smooth that it really only comes across as a sound change.  The temperature gauge started creeping up on a steep upgrade with a downshift all the way to 2^nd gear, but it didn’t appear to be heading for trouble anytime soon.

Overall, our first experience has us feeling pretty confident in our plans.  I think I made great choices, perhaps lucky choices, in both the van and the trailer.  I can see living like this.  Now we need to try a trip without hookups.

This trip wasn’t without a little recreation.  We took a short hike along Matanuska Lake last night.  This afternoon we drove down to the river for a hike, stopped by a mountain biking trailhead to see what it looked like, and then took a hike from the trailer around several lakes in the area.  We saw lots of fish in the shallows along Long Lake so I returned to do a little fishing this evening.  I only caught three.  The fish were pretty sluggish and would only hit very slow moving lures.  I caught two of them on a big fly that I was casting with my spinning rod.  I just couldn’t work the fly rod along the shore. When I tried, I hooked a tree behind me and had to break my line. Oddly, the fly dropped out of the tree and landed on top of my small fly box that was on the ground.