Spring is beginning to rear its beautiful head. Even the snowmobile trails are becoming soft and most the road crossings have melted.

March 2, 2020 - Monday morning

33 degrees/clear skies/windy

Pentoga Road

T minus one day and counting! Sometime on Tuesday, Miss Sargie and I will be blasting off for the southlands of America. Our plan is to drop Sadie Karen off at her home in Iron Mountain and just keep going. 

I haven't been this excited in years!

Sunday was an almost perfect day. With highs approaching fifty, we used almost any excuse to be outside. I worked on the drive for a while and was able to loosen more ice.

It's a tricky procedure to break chunks of ice without hitting the pavement. I gently tap it with a chisel, a spud, or in Inupiaq, it would be called a tooq. When conditions are just right, a crack will form and the ice will break away. Once on the blacktop, the separate pieces melt fairly rapidly.

Sargie usually works alongside of me, but the girl has been placed on injured reserve after pulling a muscle in her arm. She wants to be 100% and firing on all cylinders for shopping and socializing in the coming weeks.

Lately, we've been dining on leftovers. Yesterday saw a brunch combination of almost everything in the refrigerator, mostly baked taters that were sliced and fried, Portabella mushrooms, green pepper, a chopped leftover hamburger, and four vintage sausages of questionable age.

 Throw in a half dozen beaten eggs and it was a meal fit for a king and queen... well, at least good 'nuff for Sargie and Tom.

Arriving home from our ride in the afternoon, I worked on the Blazer. With wrenches in hand, I began loosening, cleaning, skinning my knuckles, and swearing a bit when I forgot where I was and bumped my noggin on the raised hood. I'm not certain what all I did, but for the first time in a long time, the old beast fired up and purred like new.

Well, almost new. 

OK, it ran like a used vehicle that's seen it's better days.

Hey, it started, ok?

I carried in the two totes filled with my summer clothes and will sort through those today. A couple of chunks of wood and a large burl were also made ready for the trunk. 

Sadie had a good day. I don't believe the pup was ever inside for more than a few minutes. She played fetch, explored, and did all those things that puppies do on nice spring days, including getting muddy.

I went for a quick three mile walk last night before dark. Today will be my last seven miler until we arrive home later in the month.

Time to move along. I'll go for my stroll at first light. After, it will be all about packing and making the house ready for our departure. 

For today's random Alaska picture; actually, there are three. 

First is of my airboat. The arctic is full of sloughs and shallow streams. I used the boat to gather firewood, driftwood that had washed down river out of the Brooks Range, from water that was too shallow for a conventional watercraft. The airboat was also handy during those times when the ice was either too thin or too rotten to get to the village. I'd glide across the ice, then into open water, then back onto the ice.

The boat was a lot of fun, but just wasn't practical for the arctic. The Lycoming aircraft engine required constant maintenance and being so isolated, I was always having to improvise for parts, make seals and gaskets from cardboard, etc. Also, the boat had a tendency to leak around the rivets. Seems I was always fixing something or the other. 

I found these pictures of pike and whitefish. Looking at the size, you can understand why I don't get too crazy about pike fishing in the UP. Note, how the fish are lying with some taking up over half the length of the table. 

Actually, these fish aren't overly large for the arctic. Elmer and I figured the largest northern pike I caught weighed around 34 lbs, an Alaska State record, but we had no official scale on which to record it. All we have are pictures.

I talked with various wildlife troopers who told me that while flying over various sloughs and ponds, they'd seen pike well in excess of six feet long. I know Brother Elmer had one on while ice fishing that wouldn't fit through the hole and snapped a seventy five pound test steel leader.

OK, it'll be light soon and it's about time to strap on my hikers and do a quick seven miles. After, I need to get some hickory wood from down by the storage container to take to Mississippi Brother Garry, then begin to put everything together for packing.

After all, a man's work is never done.

So are the tales from Pentoga Road...

The whitefish that was in this pike's stomach weighed several pounds. I filleted and ate it also.