Well, I did get up to the Beta Site this weekend. The roads were…okay..enough that I suspect I can get my truck up there if the weather doesn’t turn to snow by next weekend. The road onto the property itself was okay but there were a few berms of snow that were not going to make motorized ingress possible.

There was a fairly deep (2-3′) bern of snow at the entry point, but after that it was pretty much like this all the way to the top:

However, in the shady spots, you got these moguls that are about two feet deep which would probably have been high enough to center the SxS. This is the view down the road from the high point leading into what could be described as the ‘building area’:

That particular section of ‘road’ needs some serious trimming back and thats definitely on the agenda over the summer. I did, also, get a chance to try out the Milwaukee M18 chainsaw on some lodgepoles that had fallen across the road. Worked like a champ. Very convenient.

Since every trip up there is a learning experience, I made sure to pack the things I forgot last time that I thought I would need. One of the things was a full-sized D-handle shovel. However, I didn’t have a convenient way to carry or mount it in the SxS. A friend of mine gave me some of these a few weeks back and this was the ideal time to try them out. I wrapped them around the shovel and one of the roll bars, cinched ’em down tight so they wouldn’t chatter against each other, and spent forty minutes driving over bumpy roads. Everything stayed tight and together. Because of their elastic nature, they keep things held together quite nicely. Definitely a product that performed as I needed:

And, yeah, I brought the snowshoes this time and didn’t need them.

Gamecam has been acting weird and not reporting in the way it has been supposed to. I suspect the issue is that I’m in a middle-of-nowhere where there is utterly no cell signal. When I eventually get StarLink up there, that’ll get sorted out handily.

It’s looking like 100% access-with-the-truck is in the card in the next couple of weeks, which means its time to start staging stuff. This means I need to fish or cut bait in terms of picking a small structure design and committing to it. Goal is to have a decently protective, small, simple shelter up there in time for hunting season.

All in all, a good trip. Nothing major went wrong, I got to see how things look in the early spring season, and got the impression that its coming on time for some of the bigger steps to get taken. So..not an unpleasant weekend.