Category: The Vault

This is what awaited me outside as I left for work. MORE snow. As you can see the 3+ feet that had fallen before christmas has melted away to a few inches, but still remains everywhere around our home. Last night brought another half inch or so. (Oddly I left the Valentine1 on, and it kept the area above it clear of snow.)

This is 17 straight days with snow covered ground, which I’m fairly certain is the longest we’ve ever endured that condition here in my 20-some years in the Pacific Northwest. Mind you the lowlands have been snow-free for a while, but I think I’ve had enough. Can we have our rain back please?

Next week I’ll be in California though so there’s hope. (who knows, maybe I’ll bring the snow with me!)

Snowfall is like a romance. When it first arrives it is clean, bright and filled with promise of adventure.

After a while it becomes tedious and while you can recall the beginnings, the adventure is getting a little old.

By the time the end rolls around you just wish it would hurry up and leave. There is all sorts of collateral damage that is coming to light. Things are no longer clean and bright… in fact it is messy, slushy, muddy, and miserable.

The last few flakes fell out of the sky Friday. Rain returned in full force Friday afternoon. Since we had accumulated well over a meter of snow up here in the foothills it is taking forever to melt. We still have over a foot on the ground and it is slowly vanishing. The air is heavy with moisture and fog collects above empty ground as the wetness really has nowhere to go. The snow is dirty, as all the fallen tree debris is being uncovered as things melt.

The big slab of snow on the barn roof slid off today, pulling part of a rain gutter along with it. I still have not turned the water on out there though… I’ll likely wait for mid-week when the threat of a night-time freeze is gone. I imagine it will be Wednesday before we lose all the major accumulations of snow.

I did manage to get the Jetta moved today though. Sorry no pics. I shoveled out a path immediately ahead of it. Then I got Sue’s Jeep out and created a pathway for the little VW to follow. I just patiently drove up and down the driveway, the full â…“rd mile out to the plowed road. First in 4WD-Low, then is just plain 4WD. The shovel lowered a few of the very deep “high-center” areas where the ruts were very deep. During the warmest, slushiest part of the day I hopped into the Jetta and braced myself for the journey. I already had the tow eye threaded in and a tow-strap ready in the Jeep should I get stuck. The Jetta started on the first try (always a good sign) and I put it in gear and just maintained a steady, but slow pace all the way out to the road. It never hesitated or slipped too much except for the odd transition corner I had to negotiate not long after I started. Patience and persistence saw me all the way out to wet pavement. It is now parked out there awaiting my morning commute.

I bet there is NO way I would have made it out come morning if we do indeed freeze again tonight.

The boys arrive home in the early afternoon. I’ll pick them up at Sea-Tac and bring them home.

At least now I’m certain I can.

Every moment that I’ve been shut in during this big snow I’ve been trying to be creatively productive. Every moment that we’ve had electricity that is. 😉

Here’s what I’ve done so far. Think of it as my holiday greeting to everyone from the frozen Cascade foothills.

Power came back on around 4 AM. Again, the sudden flashing of the alarm clock woke me. I got up and turned on the heat again. I sat around reading in my office until Sue got up. I wanted to get started on the pipe repair but the noise of the Dremel cutting through a pipe would certainly wake Sue, and I’m trying to be a considerate husband. 😉

The day before I shot this photo to show all of you what I’m dealing with:

My idea was to put a shut-off in the wall a few feet above the faucet. Wrap insulation around the whole thing, then worry about reconnecting the faucet and fixing the drywall later.

Once Sue woke up I started, and actually had it done pretty quick. Amazing what having electricity will do for you. 😉

I turned the water back on, and the fix held!

We showered (ahhh… so nice!) and I set my work phone to forward to my cell, and then drove Sue up to her job. I brought along my computer, hoping to get on her office’s network and maybe get some work done. No dice. I left her, drove around Mount Vernon, picked up some candles, found some unsecured wifi, and did a bit of work.

I shot this series and badly stitched them together… it is one of the bends in the Skagit River as it goes through Mount Vernon. Sort of captures the mood today.

Sue ended up having to go into Court for some matter, so I snoozed in the Jeep for a while, occasionally chatting with the office. We finally got on the road back home around 3. Sue insisted on stopping at Costco which is in Marysville, I resisted, but… resistance is futile. As I suspected, traffic was completely snarled around it. We spent an hour getting in and out. Traffic was snarled at the Arlington/Darrington exit too, as we can only assume an accident on SR 530 had it backed up. We overshot exit 208, took 210 and navigated surface streets back to Arlington via SR9. I called Les Schwab and they said they had JUST received our new tire, so we stopped there and picked that up. They had the tire mounted and offered to put it back on the Jeep. They took the spare off, put the right rear wheel back on and sent us on our way… all for no charge. I love Les Schwab. If you live in the Pacific Northwest I highly recommend them for tires.

I’m now collecting and editing all the timelapse footage I’ve gathered over the past few days. Stay tuned.

The power came back on around 4 am. The sudden bright blinking of my alarm clock woke me up. I turned on the heat and went to my desk to finish writing the post that was interrupted the night before. Sue awoke a little while later and called a few plumbers… who just laughed at her. I sent an email to my office to let them know there was no way I was coming in. Sue works for Skagit County and of they decided to open for business so she said she was going in. I figured I’d go with her and buy some plumbing supplies and have a go at fixing the pipe myself. (They also have showers at her office! Hot water.. ahhh.) All my BioDiesel work have increased my plumbing skills a bit. In reality I’m likely just knowledgeable to be dangerous. I figured we could always get a real plumber out here to fix up my bodge. We packed up the Jeep with a shovel, some warm clothes and heavy boots and struck out north for Mount Vernon. The roads up in the foothills were awful, but once we got down to sea level things were considerably better. The freeway from Arlington up and over the Stanwood hill was a bit dodgey (we saw a few cars off the road including one SUV completely inverted in the ditch with two State Troopers looking at it slack-jawed), but once down in the Skagit Valley things seemed OK.

Until we got a flat tire.

I was just rolling along and suddenly the right rear of the car sagged and I knew we had a flat. Unfortunately we were in a single-lane, snow-bound freeway and no shoulder. I rolled up to the next exit, and found a spot to change the tire. It was on old highway 99, still not on the shoulder, but at least there was very little traffic. The tire was flat as a pancake, from having been driven on for almost 2 miles. I got the jack out and raised the car up, removed the flat, but then could not raise the damn car far enough to get the spare on. WTF? I had to put the flat back on, and then jack it up from the trailing arm instead of the frame. This scared me quite a bit since the other wheels were on frozen pavement. I finally managed to get the suspension compressed and the vehicle raised enough to install the spare. Tossed the jack and flat into the trunk, and continued on to Sue’s office. I dropped her off, and ran some errands. First to the hardware store for plumbing parts, then on to the pet store for some dog food. I also picked up some bird seed and some nuts to feed the deer I’d seen wandering around the neighborhood. Then I went to Les Schwab to get the flat fixed. It was pandemonium. Everyone was there buying chains, snow tires, etc. They said the tire was toast but did not have a replacement. Grrr.

I went back to Sue’s office and took a hot shower. Sue finished up her work and we headed home. On the way we stopped at the Les Schwab in Arlington to see if they could fix our tire. They were also swamped and said they’d get to it in three hours, so we left it and went home.

Above: Snowy scenes around the Goolsbee home.

I set to work on the pipe, which involved a deep-snow trudge out to the barn to gather tools. Along the way I shot the above photos. Meanwhile Sue was out spreading feed around for critters. Back in the garage, I found that my beloved Dremel would not work. Sigh. I’ve owned it for about 10 years. I trudged back out to the barn to find something else to cut with, and by now it was dark. I noted this comical pile of snow on a light:

Unable to find an appropriate cutting tool I figured I’d run the Jeep CRD back into town and pick up a new Dremel at the hardware store. I was happy to find that they had one on sale half price. I also stopped by Les Schwab and check on the tire… no dice. As I turned onto my own street I noted a DOT snowplow clearing it (yeah!) but that it had left a wall of snow in front of our driveway. I grabbed my shovel and cleared enough to get in. Right as I completed that task the lights in the whole neighborhood went out. Damn. Sure enough power was out. 🙁

I hung out with Sue for a bit, as she was already reading her book by candlelight. Unfortunately she was downstairs, which is where the one “indoor” cat lives and I had to leave after about an hour. I’m allergic to cats.

Nothing really to do but go to bed.

I had to get up on the roof today and shovel off some of the snow. We’ve accumulated over 2 feet of the stuff over the past 5 days and it is still coming down. This region is not really adapted to that level of snowfall. Our roof has taken 28 years of rain and a bit of snow, but I figured it would be best to lighten the load before more comes down. The forecast has this going on for a while, so better to minimize chances of problems, right? I can recall the big blizzard of 1995 when I was awakened in the night by the sound of our roof groaning under the weight of about the same amount of snow. The precipitation turned to rain and suddenly that mass of fluffy white stuff turned into a leaden mass, threatening to collapse our house. I climbed up on the roof and shoveled like a madman that night. I filled the entire space between my Ballard area house and the garage with snow. I was able to walk from one to the other! While I was shoveling the garage roof my neighbor’s garage collapsed.

While I’m sure our house is better constructed than my old one in Seattle, it is better safe than sorry.

In my adventurous youth I was an alpinist. I still have all my equipment so I pulled some of it out and suited up for the task. My old Choinard harness doesn’t fit anymore… I’m no longer the trim 195 lb kid anymore… I’m a pear-shaped middle aged man. 🙁 The “Static Point Utility Belt” I had my friend Jeff Wright custom-build for me 20 years ago did barely fit, so that became my harness. In the old days these sorts of things were called “swami-belts” … but mine was built specifically for climbing a wonderful big slab here in the Cascades named “Static Point” which was almost a private playground of mine (and a few friends) back in the Mid-to-late 80s. It is all low-angle friction climbing so a shoulder-based rack was impractical, hence my “utility belt”… this was before harnesses started incorporating rack loops.

I dug out my old mountaineering boots and crampons, a snow shovel, and a rope. I had not worn my boots since I summited Mt. Rainier a long, long time ago. I used to do crazy things like climbing in winter… snow, ice, the works. (One of these days I’ll dig out my kodachromes and write up some climbing stories.) I suited up, tossed the rope (in a bag) and the shovel up onto the roof, and started climbing up the ladder. Just about at the top my left crampon seemed to come off, so I came back down. Upon reaching the ground I noted that the crampon hadn’t come off, but my boot sole did!

These are an old pair of Koflach mountaineering boots, IIRC the second generation of plastic boots. They were hailed as being a technological breakthrough that would last forever compared to leather boots. While they certainly were warmer and drier than leather, my Asolo “snowpine” leather telemark boots from the same era certainly lasted longer! I wonder if REI would take these back as defective? 😉

I put on different boots… a tired old pair of Dynafit TourLite ski mountaineering boots, and ascended the ladder once again. I retrieved the rope and wrapped it around the enormous natural bollard that is our chimney, attached myself to it via a set of ancient Jumar acsenders given to me by Ray Smutek. I made a slow circumnavigation of the roof, shoveling off a thick layer of snow all along the edges. The idea is to lighten the load, and hasten melting into the gutters when warmth returns. I was amazed how quickly my brain recalled rope & crampon protocol. The rope wasn’t going to save me if I went off, but it did enable me to perform a classic tension traverse and let me maintain balance as I walked along the edge of the roofline by giving me something to lean away from. This was critical in the moments when large, heavy shovelfuls of snow would dislodge and fall away. The little ‘hip check” maneuver to tip it over the edge would likely send me over the edge after the snow had I not had a force to counter against in another direction.

About halfway through the job I ascended up to the wide flat chimney top to sit down shed a layer of clothing and cool off. I had also forgotten how hot you can get while laboring in cold weather! As I sat there I slapped myself for not bringing a camera up there to document a bit of this for you all. Oh well. One thing I noted while up there… a triggered memory really… was the full-body tension that comes with a certain sound. The trees would occasionally lose their accumulated snow and the “whump – whoosh – whump” sound they make while doing it is exactly the sound a slope makes when it avalanches. To anyone who has travelled in high country in winter, on skis or on foot, knows… and fears, that sound. I was safe however… merely sitting upon the summit or ridges of Mt. Chez Goolsbee.

After I completed the full-roof-circumcision, I went around the newly rebuilt deck and shoveled off the huge piles I had dumped all over it. Man that snow was heavy! Sue even pitched in on this effort after I wore myself out. I was thinking how nice it would be to have the boys here, as they could have done this WHILE I was doing the roof.

As I finished the task I noted water flowing on the driveway and went down to investigate. Sure enough a pipe had burst in the garage. Dammit. This is that garden hose faucet out at the far end of the garage… the one that is subject to freezing. I’d been running a candle under the faucet itself for days now to keep it from freezing. Why had it burst? I shut off the water to the house and undid the faucet from the wall. No obvious issue there, but something was wrong. Time to break into the drywall! Went through it with a hatchet. I decided to just plug that pipe in the wall. I grabbed my plumbing gear from the barn and tried to improvise a plug. I thought I had it sorted out and turned the water back on. A torrent came streaming out of the wall, from higher up than what I had excavated. Turn the water back off and remove the entire bit of (wet) drywall to find a VERY small burst area in the copper pipe about two feet up from the 90° bend where the faucet goes out the wall. My candle had kept the faucet from freezing but could not keep the pipe inside the wall warm. Oh well. It is now after dark and too risky to go into town to try to find the gear to fix this. Thankfully in Sue’s paranoia we’d filled the bathtubs with water to have in case of emergency to run the toilets. We have plenty of drinking water saved in the downstairs fridge too. We’ll be fine… so long as the power stays on.

We ate a dinner of warmed up leftovers and a nice bottle of Tempranillo. Afterwards I went into my home office to write this up, and… the power went out! This was about 7 pm or so. Nothing to do but crawl into bed. Amazing how absolutely dark it is without power.

Around 3 am the power came back on, much to my relief. In the time between 7 pm and now (~4 am) it has snowed another foot!

Thankfully I left the ladder and rope set up should I need to return to the roof for more excavation.