I'm not a morning person, but I appreciate the sunrises I am able to meet up with.
It's about 5 degrees, and the wind is blowing enough to convince me to set up the table downwind of the truck. I'm in my big puffy jacket, my puffy pants, my ski balaclava, ski gloves, extra beanie, and I'm still a bit cold. As I pour water from my water jug into my two pots, ice crystals instantly form inside the pots. I boil an extra 2 quarts to return to the jug, in hopes that it will remain liquid. I stamp in circles around my kitchen, ready my pack for the day's journey, and get to eating my dehy and drinking some coffee while I wait.
At 740, a big pickup crawls it's way down the snowy road and out hops the CO. I pull off my headgear and introduce myself. She isn't 6 feet tall, but she does have tree trunks for legs. I'll take it. We mess with the truck briefly, trying to charge the battery and a few more things that I was scared to do with my battery in jeopardy the day before, but nothing works. I hand over the GPS collar because I know I'll forget later. A stroke of luck, she knows a guy who does offroad recovery and texts him while we sling on empty packs and get walking. It isn't long before he gets back to her and is on his way with a few spare parts and way more knowledge. It takes us a couple hours on the low route, following my tracks from yesterday, but we arrive to the kill site. I had pulled teeth from the jawbone for aging the night of the kill, but took a picture of the remaining teeth today to prove her 4+ status. If you want to nerd out on molar style wear, let me know if you have a better estimate than my 7.5-9.5 years range.
I'm contemplating what to ask the CO to carry. I ask if she wants a back leg, she says, "I'll carry whatever you want me to." Its a touch under half her body weight. I decide to overload a touch and put a little under half my body weight in my pack. We make our way back to the trucks without incident. Turns out she's a bit of a badass and never complains and is rarely more than a few strides behind me. I'm grateful for the legit help. At the trucks, we eat lunch in her truck. It's the first time I've ever been in a LEO's vehicle, and the most I've ever enjoyed just being warm again. The daylight math doesn't add up for another trip to the meat pile, unfortunately. The offroad recovery guy pulls up about 20 minutes later and we all try for about an hour and a half to get the truck running, to no avail. It's getting a bit late, and the ORR asks if we need to get packs and headlamps to get the last load out, and I have to make the call to say it's too far to get back in the daylight, and too dangerous to do in the dark. At this moment, I wasn't aware that the ORR had just been in this very area helping a relative get a cow, but they had gotten one within a mile of the road. I find that out on the ride out after making the decision to ask if either of them would ride me out to a motel, and the ORR said he could do that and get an offroad wrecker here later in the evening and would help me get everything out tomorrow. At the motel, I get him his own room and he meets a guy with a wrecker about an hour away and returns. I'm beginning to dread the cost of this whole experience, but if I can get home, with a bison, I'll call it good.
I make some more calls, trying to find a way to get the truck home since it seems to be dead. No Uhaul within 250 miles has a flatbed trailer and a vehicle that can tow it. I ask a friend for a favor, and though a big ask, he agrees to get a trailer in Denver and pick me up in Utah the next night without much hesitation.
Adulting has reached epic levels.
The next morning at 7am, I'm ready to go, and the ORR and I start out in the wrecker, a ~2000 GMC dually. The CO offers to return to help, but I think we can manage it between the two of us. There's a storm coming in the late afternoon or early evening, so we're racing the weather a little bit.
I'm getting to know the guy. We'd probably be friends if he lived closer. He loves to hunt, loves to help people, very straight shooter, very tough. We chat most of the way about all different kinds of things. Somewhere along the 25 miles of rocky BLM road, the truck starts making some noises, and then the power steering goes out. We stop, and there's a pretty good PS fluid leak. The truck is still drivable, technically, but the hydraulic assist on the brakes (my best understanding, not a car guy) runs off the power steering fluid too, so we have bad steering and bad brakes, and we're about to put a bunch of weight on the back. No worries, we just have some crazy steep switchbacks with cliffs on all sides to go up and back down later, and a snow storm on the way. We drive to my truck, park, and head towards the bison to get the last bit of meat. The ORR is doing this out of the goodness of his heart. 140lbs of meat and hide await us at the kill site. We take the higher route that the ORR had used to get and recover his relative's bison earlier in the season.
At the kill site, the ORR is very concerned about being able to get this weight out, and asks if it can be boned out or if I'd consider leaving anything not mandatory to retrieve. It's all frozen solid, and I push back on leaving anything at all (though technically the hide, flank meat, and ribs could legally be abandoned). We start making our way back up the ridgeline to the higher trail. It's tough going. I've got my kuiu pack that I've put 144lbs in before, but the ORR is using a much lighter duty pack, after about a mile, he pulls something in his lower back and can't go any further. He wants to bone out the front shoulder he's carrying, and would need to build a fire to thaw it out first. I think he is a little delirious from pain at this point, and I just want to be out. I say, "Give me the shoulder, here are my keys. You take the 35lbs of trim you have and go get things hooked up. I'll be slow, but it'll be faster than a fire." He agrees, and once I'm standing, now carring 105lbs of meat and hide, and 15lbs of water and pack and safety gear, he takes off, with me following his tracks.
The deep canyon from a few days before, I crossed in the middle the first time, lower edge the rest of the trips.
We make it back to the trucks, and I load coolers with meat while the ORR hooks up the broken down truck.
We crawl out of the mountains. The first several miles going about 2-5mph in 4WD Low. We add some power steering fluid right before the switchbacks, but it leaks out before we reach the bottom. We only have to reverse twice, only get within a foot of the edge 3 or 4 times, and make it out of the switchbacks unscathed, the ORR wrestling the steering wheel, but never complaining. The going is still very slow after the switchbacks, with the brakes impaired, gaining too much speed could be catastrophic.The ORR keeps apologizing for how slow we are going, but I tell him that I am so releaved we are making it out at all that I don't care how slow it happens. He laughs. We are supposed to be meeting my friend with the trailer at I70 right about now, but with the slow packing and brakes and power steering issues necessitating caution, we were a few hours behind schedule. I had texted from the a ridge on the packout, asking if the friend could meet us in the little town we started in, and he had agreed. With at least a plan in place, I start to relax. Not being the driver, I'm able to enjoy one final sunset, as the weather holds a bit longer.
