I messed up.
The weather in Nunavut is still below freezing, but the melting on the roads has made it time to dig out the ATV we parked in front of our house. As you can see from the above photo, our quad has been encased in solid ice underneath the dusting of snow we have. The driver's side tires were okay, with the depth of the ice being around 6-8 inches. But on the passenger side, the ice had built up to be around 2 feet thick between the quad and the beige wagon!
Where did the ice come from?
Most Nunavut communities have their water delivered to them by a truck that fills a large storage tank underneath the house. There should be a sensor in the tank that tells the delivery driver to shut off the water to prevent overflowing of the tank, but over the years almost ALL of those systems have broken on every unit. This means that each time you get your water tank filled, which can be around 2-3 times a week, the truck spills several dozen gallons of water out of the overflow pipe. The extreme arctic cold allows all this water to freeze and accumulate over the long, brutal winters.
🤔 Now that I think about it all this water spills on the foundation pads out front which could potentially cause them to shift as the ground and water expands and retracts. That might explain some of the new cracks we've seen forming around the corners of the house. Anyway, that's just an aside, back to the quad!
So, every other year we've been up here the water has flowed "back", under our house. But this winter wasn't going to be like the others. We noticed the weather was different early on with far less snowfall being the first clue that something was up, and once water and ice started to show up around the second step of our front stairs back in February we knew it was going to be bad. But it wasn't until I scraped back the layer of snow around our quad that the true magnitude of how different this winter had been was revealed. What was normally firmly packed snow had completely been replaced by ice. On a normal year we would be able to dig all the snow down to the rocks that we call a front lawn in this area. I expected the bottoms of the tires to be stuck down, but I was not prepared for this level of water.
So I Started Blasting (chips of ice away with a hatchet)
Over the next week my wife and I hacked and chipped at the ice around the quad. We poured salt around the tires to soften up the snow a bit as it melted in, which worked well. And we dug large trenches around the entire ATV to make enough room to start chipping away at the ice underneath. I really miss working my old job down south, where I was catching 100+ pound bin sheets all day, because my stamina has really taken a downturn over the past 4 years. I would swing that axe until my arms felt like jelly, then take a break for the day and come back to it the next. We cleared all the tire hubs (except for that back passenger tire) and managed to free those 3 tires from the ice. But by this point we were getting burnt out and looking into borrowing a heat-gun to just melt the last tire out.
Enter Gypsy's Student
Gypsy was getting tired of the slow progress we were making and decided to hire one of her favorite students to take a whack at it. Best money we ever spent. His muscles don't tire out anywhere near as quickly as our 30-ish-year-old bones! 😅 As my mother always said, "You're young, you'll get over it." But really, we know he has a trip coming up and it's always nice to go on a trip with some extra money in your pocket.
So he got down there and started to chip away at all the ice surrounding the frame. At one point someone gave him a large prybar and he was able to pop free a vast amount of ice in short order. (That pry bar worked so good we already have one ordered and coming up even though we won't make this mistake ever again) Within 2 hours he had the last tire clear down to the tread. With only a little bit more work we were able to pop the last tire free and then it was time to get the quad out of the deep ruts it sat in.
Oh, wait, it's a 4 wheeler... I can just drive it out... And so I did.
Upside-down Puppies
With that objective complete it was time to get back to more fun activities. Like taking the dogs on long snowmobile runs that leave them so tired they both end up belly-up within 15 minutes of getting home. Gotta love it!
Next winter we will be putting the quad in our shed. The only reason we didn't use the shed this year is because we were forced to move it out onto the tundra, right beside where they pile all the snow from the year, so we were concerned that if the snow removal drivers didn't block our shed in, then the drifting snow would. But, it appears we have some nice drivers out there and they even scooped a bucket of snow out from in front of our shed so that we can access it to put away our snowmobile. Thanks dude!
Find my photographs of Nunavut scenery and Wildlife on my website, Midnight Sunsets
