Grum's Stories of the Field Part 2

So hello again grumfans.

Yes I am posting twice today because I am bored.

Joe has pms. Well he calls it "perfect man syndrome", but I prefer to just call it pms without further explanation. We were discussing what women want in a perfect man. I suggested that he should be able to chop wood and raise cattle. Joe suggested it was raising wood and chopping cattle. I agreed. We then agreed that women have no idea what they want and that our many skills of chopping and raising both cattle and wood are wasted on them. The truth is women are crazy and we'll never understand them. Mind you so is Joe, but he's the happy kind of madman, who gets far more delight out of chopping cattle than he probably should. Go Joe! Oh yeah he also helped me park the rav in the garage sideways some months ago, see above. Yes we managed 360 degrees. Its a small (and wonderfully fun) car, and a big garage.

Ok time for the second harrowing episode of grum's tales of near death in the field. This time: Overloaded helicopter versus Downdrafts by a ridge.

Ok so this was, again, the first of the two seasons i was a field assistant. The guys had sent me back to Revelstoke early with approximately 300 kg of rocks, to save on helicopter space for when they were extracted three days later. So it was me, Matt the pilot, five or six buckets full of rock samples, food and propane for the girls from Carelton University, and my personal gear in the Bell 206 Jetranger. The plan was to drop off the food and propane to the ladies at their camp, before heading home. They were camped on the lee face of a ridge on Mount Thor, about 30 km south of Revelstoke. For those unfamiliar with a 206, they are small and cannot carry much weight. For those unfamiliar with helicopters in general, they are flimsy and lightweight, and easily pushed about by the wind. So Matt was clearly unhappy about 300kg of extra mass to begin with (every single time he's extracted us he eyes the buckets of rocks critically). So we approach their camp, and just as we get below the top of the ridge and are preparing to set down, I sense the subtlest of sways in the copter, nothing that alarms me. I am busy watching the girls waving at us. I completely failed to notice that we had been shoved towards the ground by a serious downdraft whipping over the ridgetop, a situation which Matt cannot remedy by trying to rise due to the extra mass. To my great surprise he suddenly jammed the stick into his left thigh and the copter fell, sideways, across the ridge. We levelled out and (with no embellishment at all) he put the body of the copter between two trees as the rotors went over their tops. This clued me in to how much altitude we had lost so suddenly. I looked at Matt. He apologised over the headphones and explained what happened in a commendably calm voice. He was quite clearly sweating. We landed further downhill away from the dangerous ridgetop and the girls, who'd had a perfect view of all of it (including the sudden drop which I had not noticed), came over to check we were ok.

I didn't clue in until well after we had reached Revelstoke and I'd got back to our house of lodging how close we had come to smashing the fragile aluminium aircraft all over Mount Thor.

All's well that ends in the well. Or something.

Don't miss tomorrow's thrilling installment, when we almost get killed by falling boulders at the end of a long hard day. To prevent stress in this stress-filled world, which inevitably causes irritability, hernias, drinking, and finally death from cirrhosis of the liver, I can let you know that nobody is killed, and in fact the only injury suffered is a dislocated pinky finger, which was soon fixed (with shock and awe). To maintain some sense of suspense, the details of exactly whose pinky finger becomes dislocated will remain a mystery. It is thought that this is a safe level of stress.

Cheers y'all.