Mackenzie Trail 2005 - Part 4

Day 4 — Determined to do better than we had the night before, Mark and I got up at 5 and launched his canoe for a further try at fishing Tsasha Lake. It was still pretty dark, and quite foggy. By the time the electric motor had delivered us to the other side of the lake, it was light, but very chilly and foggy. We found several island with deep channels between them. We let out our lines in the fog and started trolling. Shortly we saw a beaver fishing in the same area, which raised our hopes a little. The sun rose and immediately warmed us up, chasing away the fog. Mark caught the first rainbow trout soon after. In short order, cruising between the islands we had our limit for the day of plump fresh trout. At about 8:30 we headed back toward the lodge.
A quick gulp of some breakfast, cleaning the fish and putting them on ice and we were ready for the day's real project. This was to be a day off of driving, but we had agreed to rebuild a fallen bridge for the lodge owner.
This commenced with Peter and I dismantling the existing cross logs and laying them on each bank. The ladies arrived soon after and their job was sorting the cross logs, and hammering back the 6" spikes for reuse. A few were rotten, but most were in good shape. The biggest challenge was we didn't have enough spikes as we hadn't really prepared for this activity in advance. When we asked the owner for nails and tools, he had only bee able to provide a few gyproc nails, about 1.5 inches long, which really didn't cut it for 4-5 inch thick cross logs. So we came to the conclusion that every third log would get nailed, and the two logs in between would lay loose.
The rest of us teamed up, using Kris' D90, to pull out the three old stringers out of the creek and clean up the banks at both ends. Mark and Bill were sent out on a search for new stringers, of which they found two large enough beetle-kill logs up above the airfield and dragged them back to camp with Mark's 110.
We couldn't find a large enough third stringer so opted to chop a beetle-killed tree right down at the lodge. Only thing was, it had a twist at the base of its trunk, so presented some falling challenges. As well, there was an outhouse/sewer shed to its right at the 2:00 position, and three cabins on the left, about 10:00. After stringing a line as high as we could up the tree, which was attached to Kris' truck about 100 feet away, Peter, Phil and Dave T proceeded to notch it and back cut. After everyone was clear, Kris gave it a tug. Even with the line pressure helping to set the direction, it came down within about 6 inches of the outhouse, but in so doing cleared out a bunch of weeds anyway.
After lopping off all the dead branches, and trimming the ends, Kris dragged it across the stream with his D90 and into place as the third and final stringer. Bit of trimming and balancing and we were ready to reassemble the cross timbers.
Peter headed the crew hammering the cross timbers back in place, as all the rest sorted and brought up timbers from both sides. It didn't take long before it was actually looking like a bridge again.
To finish it off, Kris and Mark used their chainsaw to trim the ends of the cross timbers to the same length, with the 2-3 foot end pieces dropping into the stream. We didn't want the logs to float out into the lake, so while they were doing this, I was sent down to the stream mouth to catch the pieces and toss them onto the bank. If you can imagine, a robust (fat) guy like me chasing about 60 of these log ends as they were floating past. I caught all but two. Oliver, our border collie, was in there and retrieving all the short pieces, which were about 3 inches thick. I was surprised at how fast he caught on and made himself useful.
The owner was pleasantly surprised at how fast the bridge went up and before long had line up other tasks he was hoping we'd do. We did a couple of more jobs, such as draining boats, and dragging an old wharf out of the lake for the winter, but spent most of the afternoon laying low and relaxing.
Art Pye, the part time caretaker for the lodge, was stringing yarns about the lodge, the area, and the Mackenzie Trail, keeping us all interested and giving us lots to think about.
This was followed by a nice campfire, and we turned in for the night, prepared to continue our trip the next morning.