Someone with a vacation home out in the sticks isn’t likely to grasp the issues either.
And when I talk about weather issues, most of the time what it all comes down to-whether it’s winter, or summer, rain or snow-is one factor:mud.
The mud all around northern Arizona is typically a reddish colored volcanic based high clay content goop. It’s thick, heavy, sticky yet slick as snot down a water slide when wet; and hard as concrete when dry.
The reason this mud presents us so many issues isn’t at first obvious, and there are several issues to consider.
The first issue is what impact vehicular travel on the roads have when they are muddy. In short, even one regular sized 4×4 slogging it out over a muddy road destroys the road. There will be ruts that are from 4-8” deep, criss-crossing the road, often off the road, into the ditches-pretty much deep nasty ruts will be left everywhere and there is nothing anyone can do to fix those ruts until everything dries up. And even once the road is dry, those ruts are damage that require big equipment like a road grader to fix.
The second issue is most of these back roads are privately owned and privately maintained-often enough by the subdivision or property owners association. Most POAs have minimal funding for expensive road maintenance, and there may only be enough in the budget to blade the road once a year-and sometimes there isn’t even that much, or there is no POA and the roads are maintained as best as the locals can with whatever limited resources they have. What all this means is if you go flogging around the muddy roads and tearing them up-you are definitely angering the locals and making their travels miserable for a long time after you’ve had your joyride and left. There’s reasons why most people who live out in these remote areas just stay put when the weather is bad and wait to travel when things are better, and damaging the roads is one of those reasons.
The next issue is vehicle damage. If you take your vehicle down one of these goopy muddy roads, the best case scenario is a very time consuming and expensive car wash. The risk of real vehicle damage is high. Even at low speed, the slop and terrain will trick you or suck your vehicle into a ditch, boulder or tree, and next thing you know you have a flat tire, wrecked fender, or other body damage.
And when that happens, chances are good that you are now also stuck. Stuck in a remote area with little or no cell phone service, and the nearest tow truck hours away. And those tow trucks aren’t really going to do you any good anyway-they can’t help you until the roads dry out enough for them to travel. Locals aren’t really going to want to help you-remember, you just tore up their road, so they are already displeased with you. Furthermore, if they are smart, they have also learned that even if they have heavy equipment that could maybe get you out, running that equipment in the mud has a terribly high operating and cleaning cost.
But if you haven’t lived out in the sticks and experienced all this first hand, it’s hard to comprehend.
I’ve had a few potential customers sorta give me a hard time when I tell them I won’t bring our trucks out to their location if it’s muddy. I’ve gotten a couple comments like” It’s just mud. You must not know how to drive off road, it’s not that big a deal.”
Sigh.
Look, I’ve got well over 30 years experience driving off road. I’ve driven off road desert race vehicles, pre runners, 4×4’s, quads, SXSs, and heavy equipment. I can do things in two wheel drive that most people can’t do with 4 wheel drive. I’ve been in dust, silt, rocks, mud, and everything in between. I’ve been well over a hundred miles an hour in terrain that would destroy a normal vehicle, and I’ve been bound up on the rocks barely moving on three wheels locked in 4low. I was driving off road vehicles as a kid for years before I ever drove anything that touched pavement. In short, I’m no Ivan Stewart, but I absolutely know my way around off road driving of all different kinds.
And one other thing I’ve done that most people haven’t is drive real heavy work trucks off road in adverse conditions.
There is a vast gulf of difference between driving a 6 thousand pound SUV in the mud, and a 12 thousand pound fully loaded work truck in that same mud. And yet another huge difference when you take 50 thousand pounds of semi truck and trailer down dirt roads… The level of difficulty, damage, loss, and the cost of the tow bills for work trucks isn’t even on the same planet as compared to your normal SUV, car, or truck.
All of the above really just deal with trying to GET to a job-we haven’t even started on how terrible it is to try and actually WORK out here when it’s muddy. Miserable just begins to describe it. 😬😬
Anyway, I thought you all would find our unique problems with the weather and mud in particular interesting and perhaps educational.
In the case of putting our shop together, mud wasn’t an issue-but the weather was about to be.
The last picture I showed you was from November 4th-and the weather was typically of our November weather here-perfect!
But a few days later, the weather started getting weird, and an uncharacteristically early snow storm was headed our way.
Crap!
Our issue now was we had walls with insulation up-but no roof to keep rain or snow from getting into the wall insulation and soaking it-potentially ruining both the insulation and the steel siding from trapped water.
With only a day to try and do something to protect the building and materials, I ran around frantically trying to cover up everything I could.
I rigged a makeshift cover made from tarp scraps over the tops of the walls to keep out the rain and snow that was bearing down on us.
In the last light of November 8th, I had everything battened down as best as I could as the snow began to fall.
The next morning looked like this:
The tarps worked, and a day later, everything was dried out and fine. But we had bigger problems on the horizon-an even larger storm was on its way and was set to hit in a couple days. And i was having to admit that with our limited manpower and no reach lift, setting those 35 foot long roof panels was looking difficult at best, and downright dangerous.
So in a jam, and sort of in a panic, I called someone I knew who had a steel building contractor working as one of their subs and begged him to send a crew over ASAP ahead of the storm to get us dried in.
Their B team showed up the morning of the 11th, and by days end they had the rest of the walls up and the first roof panels in place.
On the 12th, they showed back up and finished the roof, and just like that, the shop was finally dried in.
The steel building crew certainly bailed us out, and got us dried in, and for that I’m thankful.
But the quality of their work left a lot to be desired with damaged roof panels, insulation not properly flashed or trimmed, and the wall panels not hung quite right. Not the end of the world, and the building will survive, but disappointing.
Sometimes you just gotta move on.
And so we did.
At this point, the building looks done, but there is a TON more left to do to make it complete or usable.
Stay tuned!😄😄
