Hey Bleu-
I have been to Colorado three times in the last two weeks and have gotten drenched the last two times. You might appreciate my travail. I had a crew to train at a job site eight miles north of Lycan or twenty miles south of Holly. I hadn't seen the job, but general assured us we could do it. I figured two long hard days. I expect that I will be a long ways from any services, so take everything but the kitchen sink, about like I was headed to elk camp. Took my big boy cot, pad, camp recliner thinking that I might just have to stay on the job site. And plenty of food and water, thinking it could be hard to find a meal out that way.
I met the crew at the job site, which turns out to be a new scale house for a large elevator complex in the middle of no where. There is a new 1.1 million bushel grain bin, a new scale house that hasn't had back fill yet so is sitting about a foot above any ground, a portable concrete plant used to pour all the concrete a this location and a porta potty. Across the way, about an eighth mile is the old scale house. There is a steady line of trucks getting loaded from the huge piles of wheat on the ground and weighed out over at the scale house. In addition to lack of services, there is absolutely no cell phone service. There were electricians that showed up from Garden City. I asked them where they were staying and they said Holly was full so they found a B&B in Granada. They said, "Yesterday it took us two hours to find lunch, we went to Lycan and sign said 15 miles to Two Buttes or 20 miles to Johnson City, Kansas, so we decide that Two Buttes sounded good." They found nothing at Two Buttes so back to Johnson to get lunch.
I see right away that we are only going to be able to do half our project, without doing some significant building modification. Knowing that will take some time with the general and no cell phone service, I figure I better make time get done what we can and get the 140 miles back to Dodge and return next week.
In the middle of the afternoon I have to go and I mean go. I figure there is no way I can make it to the existing scale house, make my grand entrance and shout to people I don't know and who sure don't know me, "Hurry, where is your bathroom. Quick or I will lose it in my pants!", so I decide hot house porta potty here I come. I grab some wipes and head to my task at hand knowing that I must do what I have to do. I have my blue bib overalls on with my cell phone snapped in the pocket. I open the door see that the inside of the unit is filled with dirt, is rather hot and has quite an odor, but I must do this. I quickly let my overalls fall to the floor and as they do, low and behold, my cell phone comes to life indicating I have new voice mails and text messages. I am sitting there thinking, you know if I was a mind to, I could prop open this door with a five gallon bucket, sit on the throne and maybe get some text messages out. I tried to call out, but not that much signal in the john. Any way we get done what we can and I head back to Dodge with plans to return the following Friday.
During the next week we get the general to engineer building modifications that we will install then finish our work. Now they want me to train another crew, so a dark thirty last Friday, I meet this crew at the Dodge City shop and off we go to Colorado. I again have my little scissor lift on my tilt bed. We get there plenty early enough, but as we get closer I see there has been a downpour ahead of our arrival and I am thinking how am I ever going to get this scissor lift through mud to the scale house sitting there like an island in the ocean. Sure enough that is what I have gotten. Bet the elevator has a unit with pallet forks that can take my little scissor to the building. They did until two weeks ago it was needed elsewhere. So we thought we would try chaining the tongue of my trailer to this huge loader and push the trailer through the mud. There is now way we can make it to the garage doors, so there will have to be perfect alignment with a walk door and put it through there. First problem we have after we get chain to the bucket, is the loader is boiling hot. After a while the operator gets it cooled down and is pushing the trailer with scissor lift and all the tools we could load on there through the mud. After a few tries he get it just right and we are able to unload the scissor.
The building mods take longer than expected, so I have this old body in high gear trying to finish this project, because I really don't want to come back. About 5:30 the crew foreman, says, "Maybe we should get that loader back over here and pull us out." "Good idea" I say, but find out they have already left for the weekend. There is a storm brewing and there is distant thunder. The crew foreman says he will try to get my 4 x 4 truck around there and see if he can get the hitch that is down in the mud up and hooked up to my truck. I am working at a feverish pace trying to get done and the lightning strikes are getting close. The foreman tells me the storm is coming right at us. I go look out and it is close. I said, "Man I never like to leave a job this far from home with only an hour's worth of work left, but if we don't get out now we might be spending the weekend 140 miles from home waiting for someone to show up on Monday morning to get us out. The rain hit, I plowed out in four wheel drive and once on the Blacktop road put it back in two. It flat dumped the rain, but by the time I made the eight miles to Lycan it was pretty much over and you see it picture I took there. So another trip planned for Colorado, but will watch the weather and make sure it is dry.
Yesterday I had to make a run to my doc at the University of Colorado Hospital, then on to Ft. Collins for a meeting then return to Dodge. Drove in a lot of heavy rain. Was in NE Colorado in the wee hours and could see plenty of water standing in the fields.
Sure could use some rain at the Ponderosa.
