Hip deep in the East Pole mud

There's a reason I don't go the East Pole much in the summer (read, Fall, as well). The trail is so trenched if there has been any rain at all the ruts fill with water and the high sides hold it there so you can run into 100-yard long lake and because the water is so muddy you have no idea how deep they are. It is always amazing what a four-wheeler can do. I remember a time a wave in one of those lakes came right up over the front of the machine.

Most of them aren't very deep but some have no bottom. Another surprise as that when people go through them they gun it at the end of the puddle to rise up out of it. Unfortunately doing that digs the bottom deeper right at the end because they spin the tires and dig it out. It keeps getting deeper and deeper with each passing and creates also a steep rise out of it, some of them trenched enough you can high center the machine. Roaring along through water at full speed and then hit a mogul like that. It can stop the machine cold. The key is momentum... keep going no matter what and hope your momentum keeps you going when the wheels start spinning in the underwater mud. In a lot of places people have created side trails where you can go around some of the worst spots. 

 Picture seven miles of this, another puddle every few hundred feet. The worst is when you decide you can make it and then the puddle curves, you come around the corner and there is another couple of hundred feet to go through the water, no idea how deep it is or how loose the mud underneath is and then the front disappears under water. This is when your only hope is momentum and you grip the throttle and blast through it, mud flying and if you are fortunate enough you don't smack straight into one of those moguls. So in the last two days I did 14 miles of that. 

 What takes about 30 or 40 minutes in winter, takes two hours in the summer. Never stuck, rolled it on its side once and oh, yes, the mud, what a bunch of mud. I never had mud work its way INTO a cooler before. And I saw enough spruce hens for a thanksgiving feast. If I could have stopped I might have brought some home.