Adventioneering

So you can be an adventioneer and apparently get paid for it, too. Steve, how about helmet cam footage the next time you go up a wind turbine?

Steve Block sent in this excellent video.

And no, as far as I know, this is not legal in the state of Washington.

I’ve made a passing interest of convincing JG that we should acquire snowmobiles. I can think of tons of reasons to own one. JG apparently can think of reasons not to, judging by this video he sent me last night.

Go for the 1080 HD. Looks to be shot on a Hero, just like I use on my motorcycle. The jet seems to be an Avianca A320.

This reminds me that of all the different things I’ve done in my life, getting to fly a jet was like nothing else.

One of the difficult aspects of any remote trip is planning to have enough fuel. It doesn’t help that everyone going is running petrol vehicles, which generally average lower MPG than their diesel counterparts. And they make such a nice Turbo-Diesel JK, available anywhere but here.

The truth is I am not confident about what the fuel multiplier is for muddy track and bog. The closest things would probably be early-season Naches and OFR but honestly I never paid that much attention to fuel burn on those trips because they are all very short, so I never really learned anything. Thing is, the last time I actually had to care about running out of fuel on a leg was moving from Boston, and the time before that was when we all bumped down to the black rock desert the back way, which has a couple hundred mile un-refueled leg depending on time of day, times two since we were round-trip.

We plan to do some trials this spring when Naches opens up to try to determine what our fuel multiplier is over various terrain. Tom Sheppard in the VDE 2nd councils a multiplier of 1.5 to 2 for sand, and to carry +25% + 100 miles of fuel. If we assume spinning around in mud is like spinning around in sand, and go worse case, we end up with (135*2.25)+100 for the track itself, or 403 miles.

That doesn’t include getting there and back from the point of refueling stations, though. It’s 45 miles from Quesnel to the infil and (coincidentally) also 45 miles from the exfil to Anahim lake. So now it’s ((135+45+45)*2.25)+100 or 606 miles of range including the reserve.

With the TJ I almost always planned on getting 16MPG and that generally worked out for me. If the JK is similar (we’ll see later when I do practical trials) that means 37 gallons of fuel. With 18.6 in the tank (Weird because I’ve never been able to fit more than 16 in it, or so it seems) we need to carry 18 gallons, or, 4 jerry cans per truck.

That doesn’t seem so bad at all.

So I’ve been pouring over the Canadian topo maps, 2M SPOT satellite imagery, and scouring the Internet for GPS track information. I’ve managed to assemble what I think is a fairly accurate (recent to a year or two anyways) track of the main alignment for the trail.

This was, I’ll observe, a huge pain in my ass. I actually had to write software to build the track. I look forward to actually doing this trip so I can create some accurate maps. Judging by the track log, whatever GPS was being used was not entirely accurate.

The best infil point looks like it is N53 18.387 W123 08.664, which actually cuts off a 19.1 mile section of the trail which proceeds east from that point down to the Fraser river.

Exfil is at N52 56.074 W125 45.500 where the trail meets up with an improved gravel forest road network. I’m sure they are crappy but will seem like luxury after getting that far.

The track distance is 135 miles between these points (as the trail goes, not by air). Given 7 days on the trail, we need to average about 20 miles a day. There are, of course, the spots where you go a day to get two miles by all reports.

I haven’t gotten solid information but by looking at the hydrology on the NRC maps, the problems probably start around N52 57.452 W125 28.340 and proceed westward as the trail crosses ever more swamp and bog land. There are also reports of some bits earlier on (like first/second day).

There seems to be only one real river crossing, at N53 07.503 W124 24.268. I haven’t heard any stories of it being particularly difficult, although it looks like it might be on the deeper end (ala Lake Michigan in mass or that creek at the Colorado dunes).

The GPX file I’ve put together is included below; if you save it you can open it in standard tools (MapSource/BaseCamp/GoogleEarth/whatever).

AlexanderMackenzieTrail.gpx [551KB GPX]

There’s stuck and then there’s, well. Jesus.