Two days ago I felt the warmth from the sun again for the first time in about 7 months. It was pretty magical. We found a better way to raise the flags on the skiway, it's about 10 times faster, especially because we can pull two at a time. The entire skiway still took about eight hours to complete in three different sessions though. We didn't break anymore of them with this method.
Me in the 953 called Sundog. Check out that awesome blue sky!
This is the throttle (we always run at 'full rabbit' to combat the cold temperatures) and forward/backward speed. 'Full rabbit' has become something between my nickname and an inside joke between most of the people operating equipment right now.
The foot petals are how you steer.
And this handle is how you control the movements of the arm and bucket/forks. Pulling flags requires a lot of careful lining up and fine movements from this giant machine (okay maybe it's not that giant but it feels big to me) which took me a while to get a hang of but I did get a lot better at it over the course of the day. You also can't move the tracks around re-correcting yourself over and over because the tracks will just eat into the snow and sink the machine into the ice (that would be very bad, someone would have to drive two miles to tow me out) so you have to pretty much get it right on the first try with very minor corrections. I didn't sink the tractor so that was good, although you could feel it settling into the uncompacted snow when you stopped for a few minutes.
It was so clear and calm and you could see so far. Pretty awesome after being clouded in so much recently.
It was the perfect day to spend a few hours out around the skiway pulling flags. Sunny and warm and beautiful!
I harvested Watermelon number six on Sunday.
Delicious as always!
Official station opening is in 13 days, weather permitting. I even packed a box to ship home and bought the postage and brought it out to cargo DNF yesterday. I need to pack one more box, tidy up my work areas and I'll be ready to leave the ice, so crazy!!! There is less than three weeks until my redeployment date, I still can't believe the winter is over already!
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