(dS / dt) ≥ 0, or, Things Fall Apart

A couple weekends ago I took a trip up Montana Hwy 83 with my friend Beau to do some ice fishing on good old Lake Alva (here's another shot of the lake from about the same spot as the shot below).

Lake Alva, 10am, 24 January 2009. The ice was between 12 and 18 inches thick, meaning we could've--not that I would've--easily driven Ludwig on it, had the road been plowed all the way down to the shore. Beau likes pyromania to be the first order of business on the ice, so we took his chainsaw into the woods and sawed chunks off of some dead timber for a laketop fire. The saw flew to pieces in his hands as we finished getting a sledful of wood, enough to get us through the day but certainly not enough for the evening.

Beau and Bryan (who joined us during the day for a bit) ate these 10,000 calorie bacon and egg sandwiches, while I just settled for bacon on toast. My PBR tallboy is thawing out on the griddle because once a beer gets opened in these conditions, in about five minutes it's a beer slushie and in ten it's a beercicle. That portable fireplace was another casualty of the weekend, collapsing as we hauled it off the lake.

We were skunked all morning and into the afternoon, when we decided to move East about twenty yards, closer to where the stream empties into the lake. After that we had bites galore. This is Beau and the nice brookie he pulled out.

I had plenty of bites, but it wasn't until the sun started to go down and it really started to get cold that I finally caught this little brook trout. Notice my U.S. Air Force-issue arctic parka, a gift (along with an awesome pair of matching pants) from my father-in-law. I cleaned and bagged the fishie and we headed to Ludwig, leaving our gear on the ice for retrieval in the morning. I'm not wearing gloves because I'm about to clean him, which involves bare-handed work with a knife and 32-degree water.

Since we didn't have enough wood to get a Ludwigside blaze going, we thought we'd drive into Seeley Lake to buy some firewood at a gas station. Climbing the hill out of the campground, a link on Ludwig's tire chains broke and rendered the passenger-side half of his motive power useless. I was close enough to the main road that we were okay, but there was no way we'd get back out of the campground with just one chain if we went down there again. We were wary of camping along the main highway, so we went into Seeley Lake and parked behind the post office for the night. After a few beers at The Filling Station, we went back to Ludwig, where Beau stuffed himself into his -40F sack and I curled up under two sleeping bags.

The next morning Ludwig was loath to fire up, so we called AAA for a jump. Curious as to how cold we actually were, we asked the tow truck guy what the overnight low was. He didn't know how cold it'd gotten but said, "It's zero right now", and this was 9:30am. I looked it up later and saw the overnight low had been -13F. I'd say that's probably the coldest night I've ever spent out-of-doors (or "out-of-building", rather), though with Melissa on this trip it was plenty cold too. After the jump Ludwig was fine so we drove back to the frozen lake, gathered all our gear, and schlepped it the 2/3 mile back to where we parked him on the road. After a quick stop back in town for a snack however, Ludwig wouldn't start for anything.

Suspecting the battery, we took a walk over to an auto parts store. I was amazed that it was even open, considering this is a small town and it was Sunday morning. We installed it without much trouble, but it didn't help; it just helped him turn over faster.

After much troubleshooting of the ignition system and finding it satisfactory we called the tow truck guy again, prepared to shell out the big bucks for a 55-mile tow to Missoula. The guy discouraged me from doing it, saying he'd hate for me to pay $150 for the tow just to find out we had a $50 fix on our hands. He towed Ludwig to his shop (also open, to our surprise) to give us better conditions for a look-see.

He was one of those guys that warms an ACVWer's heart. He put Ludwig up on the lift and let us do half the work, which some might've found annoying, but not me. I'd much rather work on Ludwig (or anything, really) with the mechanic than just sit around in the waiting room reading Sports Illustrated or whatever. 

An engine needs three things to work: fuel, spark, and air. In the parking lot we'd already eliminated lack of spark as the problem. In the shop we found that fuel was getting where it needed to go. So, as demanded by disjunctive syllogism, we popped the air filter off of the total p.o.s. Weber carburetor that I can't wait to replace and found a lot of water. Ludwig had been ingesting fine snow by the cupful and it had gotten into the carb, making it very hard for him to start. It's hard enough for him to warm up in extreme cold with his stupid stupid center-mounted carb, and the water in with the gas was just too much for him. With the filter off and a squirt of ether, he sputtered to life and started to run well, after the gas/water mixture burned away and he began burning just dinosaur bones again. With a word to replace the air filter soon and a bill for $30, Clearwater Towing and Repair sent us packing down the road, and Ludwig managed without further incident. 

Over the weekend, these things succumbed to entropy: a chainsaw, three cans of Olympia (froze), an ice ladle, a lighter, one bottle of Beau's homebrew (froze and broke), one tire chain, the portable firepit, Ludwig's battery, his positive post clamp, his air filter, and any last tiny shreds of faith I had in the utility of Weber Progressive carburetors on these vehicles.

(miles 219,460-219,615)