A friend of mine said that they felt a little bad for me because the last few times I tried to get up to the Beta Site I had to bail due to road conditions. I replied that I wasn’t feeling bad about it at all. Each trip out there, even though it failed, gave me tons of information for later use. This weekend was more of the same…try and fail.

The amount of mud that was on the road was epic. I actually slid of the road and into a muddy borrow pit. Fortunately I was able to get back onto the fudge sundae that was the road without too much difficulty but it was a white-knuckler there for a while.

As the elevation increased, the mud decreased until we were back on snowy/slushy roads. Ok, so far so good. The big problem is this steep, sloping switchback. Last time it was a sheet of ice that very nearly punched my ticket to Sto’Vo’Kor. This time, I got out at the bottom of this treacherous stretch and walked it first to see what I was in for. The road surface was slushy ice, which was, in my opinion, traversible, with a set of chains. Fortunately, I had brought a set….the product of previous lessons learned. What I did not have, however, was time. By the time I would have chained up and gotten on my way it would have been too late in the afternoon to get anything done without risking having to come back in the half-light or dark. So…again…not this trip.

But, lessons are learned. I’m learning the conditions of the road, where the trouble spots are, what can and cannot be expected to work, etc, etc. Next trip will involve the side-by-side. I’ll bring along chains for it, as well as my unstuck gear, and we’ll see hwat happens.

Most people I relate this tale to tell me that clearly I need to expect to simply not be able to get to this property in the winter. I nod politely and agree, because I really don’t feel like explaining to them that I need to be able to access my property at any time of year under any circumstance. Heck, thats why I bought the side-by-side and thats probably why I’ll wind up with a snowmobile as well.

I’ve also mapped out the areas to start from if I want to walk in. For example, I know that it is exactly 1.75 miles in a straight line from that switchback to my property. And I  know it’s exactly two miles from a different, easily accessed point. This summer one of my projects is walk those routes to I know what to expect.

Why haven’t I taken the side-by-side up there yet? Well, there’s a bottleneck. The side-by-side gets to the general region of the Beta Site on a trailer. That trailer needs a place to be safely stowed when Im not using it…and that would be my fenced yard. But I can’t put it in the yard until I get my fence guy to come in and put a gate into my fence so I can secure the trailer and side-by-side when Im not using them. So…I need the gate so I can get the trailer so I can get the side-by-side to the general region of the property.

The fence guy came today and says he’ll have some ideas and pricing for me by the end of the week. We’ll see. In the meantime, to err on the side of caution, I’m off looking for a good set of chains for the side-by-side as well as investigating the options and pricing for a replacement set of wheels with studded tires.

So, lessons learned and I’m better prepared for next time.

ETA: Looks like there were enough posts to finally get the tag “Beta Site” into the tag cloud on the right.

Looks like the fox is out looking for a late night snack….

As long as he keeps eating the rodents and stays outta my way we’ll get along just fine.

I was toying with the idea of a small A-frame cabin-like structure up at the Beta Site. The simplicity appeals to me but the inefficient use of space does not. Obviously, your head room diminishes as you approach the sloped walls. So, what if you wanted, say, eight feet of headroom for a space, say, ten feet wide. How wide would the base of the structure have to be, and how tall would it have to be? Welcome to math.

It’s been a million years since I needed to do trigonometry. Fortunately the internet provides. Threw this into AI, “How wide is the base of a right triangle with a height of eight feet and base angle of 60 degrees“. According to the interwebs, 4.6188 feet for the base of that triangle. Okay, so to get a ten foot wide space that has eight feet of headroom, I’d go 4.6188′ for the left side, add ten feet of space for the middle, and then add 4.6188′ for the right side. Add that up and you get an isoceles triangle with a base of 19.2376′. Lets be grown ups and call it 19.25. Okay, so with an angle of 60* how tall would the triangle be? Back to the interwebs.The answer, it seems, is 16.67 feet.

A bit of a problem there…boards are available at16′ lengths, but they get expensive after that. So, realistically, slightly less than 16′ would be the way to go, yes? That means either the desire for ten foot width, or the desire for an eight foot headroom, will have to be adjusted slightly.

At the moment, I’m contemplating a small A-frame structure that can accommodate a cot, some gear, and a bit of room, so I can have a place to throw out a sleeping bag while I’m working on a larger accommodation and the infrastructure that goes with it…something not too far from this:

Its justa thought for now…another avenue I’m exploring….but it does seem to offer some advantages in terms of ease of construction. More research is called for. And math.

A bit blustery, foggy, and snowy at the Beta Site. Whatever I build there will have to be built with this sort of environ in mind.

As someone pointed out to me, I need to put a yardstick of some kind out there to give me metrics about about how deep the snow is.

Wound up not getting up to the Beta Site Sunday either. Stepped out my door, all ready to go, and…flat tire. And since I wasnt going anywhere without a spare, I had to dismount the dead tire, put on the spare, and then take the offending tire off to repair.

Well, turns out it was a fatal flat and the tire could not be repaired…had to be replaced. And a buncha money later we were back to where we started.

But, Im slightly superstitious and chalked this up to the universe trying to tell me “Not this weekend, kiddo”.

And, of course, Sunday dumped 4-6″ of snow up there, so next trip, in two weeks, will involve the chained up side-by-side. We’ll see how that goes.

The game cameras I put in are doing their job. THis guy decided to visit the Beta Site around eight this morning:

This is the second visitor that the game camera has caught. First one was a squirrel yesterday. Im not posting that, ’cause its pretty boring. This guy, though…a surprise. The area is also home to some rather larger denizens as well:

If they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone. But if they wanna challenge me in a game of Food Chain Promotion/Demotion…..well…may the best mammal win.

And being a mildly intelligent animal, I know when to take risks and when not to. Today was a day not to. Tried to head up to the Beta Site but the snowmelt in the shaded draws had turned some twisty turns of road in to sheet ice. How bad? When I came to a stop I started sliding down hill…backwards. Fate smiled and I didnt go off the side of the road but I was in a not-great situation. Pulled a shovel from the back of the truck and spent an hour dumping dirt and gravel all along the road….not to get me to where I was going, but to allow me to leave in one piece. Managed to pull it off and headed straight to the tire store for a set of chains. Will also update the gear in the back to include a spud bar for breaking ice and least one bag of sand and salt.

So, todays trip up there was a bust. But I fully intend to be there tomorrow if the weather holds up.

Thats pretty much what I said when I visited the Beta Site today…the first time I’ve been up there since it changed hands. Specifically, into my hands. I could not help myself but to say “See that tree over there? Mine. That one? Mine. That rock? Mine.” I also scolded a bird for trespassing. I have a bit of a territorial streak in me.

I wanted to head up there for more than just childish selfish reasons…I wanted to see what the roads were like, and more importantly, to see how much humanity was up there. This is an are that is well past ten miles from electricity. The number of year-round residents isn’t going to be huge…though they are there. My concern was my two closest neighbors on the two properties that were kittycorner from me. Neither property showed signs of their roads being used. At least, not terribly recently.

Of course, the road to my property (and , wow, it takes some getting used to saying ‘my property’) was equally unused. The only prints remaining in the snow were from the local wildlife and the cattle that roam the area.

A few trees had decided theyd give their lives to block the road into the Beta Site and they will get removed in the spring when the snow melts. In the meantime, they do yeoman service deterring any trespassers.

And once you get to the top of the hill, you can see down into the proposed building area.

The remaining snow was very patchy in the timber and there were plenty of places in the pines where the ground was nothing but beds of pine needles on dirt. Sat there for a while and listened to the blissful silence of…nothing. No cars, no trains, no people, nothin’…just the way I like it. It was probably about 50 degrees and sunny at that point so it was pretty dang nice to be out there. A light pullover and ballcap were plenty.

One of the reasons I wanted to get up there was because I wanted to see where along the route would be the optimal place to unload the side-by-side and continue the journey. Later this month I’ll be picking up a trailer to haul the side-by-side out there. I need to find a spot along the route where I can safely and securely park the trailer and my truck while continuing on the side-by-side. The road to the Beta Site is an easy enough, though bumpy and twisty, ride in the non-snowy season. However, once the snow sets in theres some parts that are definitely sphincter-clenchingly treacherous. Certainly, throwing some chains on the tires of my small truck wold go a long way but there will come a point where the snow or other conditions call for something a bit more dedicated to crappy terrain. So..side-by-side.

There were portions of the property that were knee deep in snow and portions that were completely bare. I definitely should have brought along my snowshoes, as well as some gaiters and yaktrax.

And, one other reason for the trip – remote game cameras. I received a couple remote game cameras for Christmas and deiced to try setting one up to keep an eye on things. I don’t necessarily expect to see much in the way of trespassers at the moment, but I would like to get the familiarity with the system and process so that when summer gets here I can set up a network of cameras at the most likely access points.

So…long day. My plan is to pick up the trailer in three weeks and haul the side-by-side out there and get some miles and experience on it. I will also be dragging up a loaded Monovault with some essentials so that theres at least some resources up there in case I do actually have to hide out up there before I get the place built up.

But, I gotta say, it was a very novel feeling to know that everything I looked at belonged to me (for as long as I pay the $50 annual property taxes, anyway.)

Oh, and the road that you see in the pictures above? It’s steep. One of the other things I wanted to do while I was up there was make sure the realtor had removed their signs. They had not. But, as it turns out, those For Sale signs are made out of a corrugated plastic that was perfect for sitting my butt on and roaring downhill at breakneck speed before tumbling out into the snow. That was fun.

What exactly is the purpose of the Beta Site? Is it the next step in my life where I eschew living in town and move to an ‘off grid’ lifestyle of careful energy usage, wood chopping, always worrying about well pumps and water…or is it an ‘in case of emergency’ sort of ‘acceptable’ shelter that while not having ‘all the comforts of home’ does provide orders of magnitude of safety over being homeless?

In short, is it a lifestyle or a lifeboat? Well, kinda sorta both…but not at the same time.

At the moment, and for the immediate future, it’s a lifeboat. A secondary location to pick up and run to in case, for whatever reason, living where I live now becomes untenable. As a lifeboat, it doesn’t need to look like something out of ‘Country Living Magazine’. It just needs to keep me warm, fed, safe, and secure. That can look like just a glorified campsite, it can look like a tweaked out garden shed, it can look like a small trailer, that can look like…well…any weatherproof box with a roof and some accommodations.

But the end goal is for it to be more than that. The end goal is for it to be a comfortable, functional, ‘homey’ place where I can snowmobile in on Dec 1, turn on the lights, fire up the woodstove, put on some quiet Spotify Christmas music, put my feet up, and watch the snow fall outside without seeing another human being until Jan 1. Thats the idealized and romanticized version, of course. I’m fully aware that its going to take a good bit of time (and money, unfortunately) to get to that.

So lifeboat vs lifestyle…for the next year, maybe two, its definitely just a place that I can run off to if need be. It’ll have some very(!) basic features but it will still give me more options than if I didn’t have the place at all. And over the next year or two, it’ll morph into something more than just a ‘bare bones’ destination. The final goal is something that is on par, in terms of convenience and appointments, with where I live now…flush toilet, hot water, heat and lighting, etc, etc. all hidden away at the end of a road no one really wants to drive down.

My birthday is in the summer, so Im thinkng that at my next milestone birthday in 2027 I’d like to have the overwhelming majority of things done, if not entirely done. We’ll see how it goes.