Caribou Hunting

The Great Caribou Hunt of 2005 has been successfully completed. The girlfriend and I drove north to Cantwell Wednesday evening. Camped there and resumed the trek 50 miles over the "Denali Highway and Muddy Goat Trail", to the Big Susitna River. Three miles from our destination the right tire, on the four wheeler trailer, blew out. I didn't become aware of it for a mile. So I dragged the heavily loaded trailer for a mile on the rim. Needless to say that destroyed the rim. As a matter of fact it wrapped the ragged remains of the rim around the hub. It took me two hours to get the remains of the wheel off so that I could put on the spare. Since it was raining hard and the rest of our hunting party wasn't due to arrive until evening, we spent the remainder of the day relaxing in the camper.
Day 2 arrived dry, with thick clouds of smoke from the forest fires near Fairbanks. The visibility varied from 3/4 mile to a few hundred yards throughout the day. The skipper, for boat 1, couldn't function in the smoke so he and his boat were beached. Boat 2 took to the river in the afternoon and the crew managed to bag one caribou. The girlfriend and I headed into the mountains on four wheelers and had a great day. We saw 10,000 parky squirrels, and one grizzly bear but no caribou. The grizzly was an 8 footer, eating blue berries on a ridge above us. I couldn't convince the girlfriend to climb up the ridge to stalk the bear so we let him go.
On day three the smoke was a little lighter so we launched both boats. Boat 1 managed to bag 2 caribou. I was on boat 2 and we managed to get another one.
The rain returned on the final day. We spend the morning getting the boats and four wheelers loaded on the trailers and getting the meat loaded. Our slow journey out was interrupted frequently.(All of this equipment repair was done in the mud and driving rain.) The first incident was when the towing ball on the Chevy pickup fell off and disappeared into the ditch. The boat and boat trailer nose dived into the road. Fortunately we were traveling very slowly anyway. The boat trailer was moved to behind one of the motor homes. A few minutes later someone noticed that the left wheel on my four wheeler trailer was about to fall off. We jacked up the trailer and retighted the lug nuts. Two of the holes in the rim had been damaged and it was discovered that the rim had been put on backwards sometime in the past. Oh yeah and the spare tire that was on the right side of the trailer, was so cracked and rotten that it was leaking air. So we had to pump it up when we stopped. Back on the move, every ten miles or so we would have to stop and retighten the lug nuts.
Hours later we finally limped into Cantwell. I located some more lug nuts at a junkyard and we double nutted the lugs. Driving 35 mph we started down the blacktop. We stopped every ten miles for the first thirty to make sure the nuts stayed tight. They did so I kicked the speed up to 55.
The 235 mile trip took us 11 hours.