I've never had any really bad experience with the weather. I've gone on boat and snowmachine rides and had some encounters with rough waves and snow storms but I usually got home on time. I do remember one time, though, when I went to Pilot Station to pick up my cousin, Anthony Nick Jr., on February 23 of this year. The day before it was snowing all day and all night, so on the day I went down there was a lot of fresh snow. It was about three to four feet deep plus it was still snowing hard.

In the morning I called to see how things were going and Jr. told me to come down and pick him up. In 30 minutes I was ready and on my way. It took me maybe two hours to get down there because the trail had a lot of snow on it. In fact there was hardly even a trail, just little ruts where a sno-go had already gone. When I got there Jr. and I went to the gas station and got a couple of gallons, then we started on our way back. But the trail was worse than it was when I came down. There was a lot of fresh deep wet snow covering the trail I'd made an hour before and it was hard going because we kept peeling off even though we were going fairly fast. By the time we got to Monarch Slough about 6 or 7 miles down the river from Marshall we ran out of gas.

When we first started walking it was fun but when we got tired we wished a snowmachine or even a dog team would come by. We were walking through wet snow and our clothes were getting wet. After walking only three miles we were very tired and we started bitching at things, especially at Greg who was in Marshall and knew we wouldn't have taken that long to get home. We finally saw the lights of Marshall about 3 to 4 miles out and every time we saw a snowmachine light we got happy, but it would always turn away and we were mad again. About one mile out I got so pissed off I started to walk faster until we got home.

We had walked for three hours and for most of the trip we were wet. We were even going to leave our coats behind at one point, but lucky we didn't because we got cold after a while. If there had been less snow we would have made it here in two hours or less.