Tractor Manuals Downunder

[Rolando Kumar]

Tenyards behind Troy, and following in his ski tracks, his partnerAlec Patterson paused to duck under a snow-laden spruce bough beforeanswering. It was snowing heavily, a cold, dry crystal snow, piling upinch upon inch on the already deep snow pack of the Sawtooth Mountainrange. In another ten minutes they would be above the timberline andthe full force of the storm would hit them.

He dropped out of sight over a small hummock and whipped down the sideof a slight depression in the slope, his skis whispering over the drysnow and sending up a churning crest of white from their tips.

Alec chuckled and poled after him into the basin. The two young juniorhydrologists worked their way up the opposite slope and then againtook the long, slow traverse-and-turn, traverse-and-turn path throughthe thinning trees and out into the open wind-driven snow field abovethem.

Just below the ridgeline, a shelf of packed snow jutted out for adozen yards, flat and shielded from the wind by a brief rock face.Troy halted in the small island in the storm and waited for Alec toreach him.

He fumbled with mittened fist at the cover of the directionalradiation compass strapped to his left wrist. The outer dial rotatedas soon as the cover lock was released and came to a stop pointing tomagnetic north. The detector needle quartered across the northeastquadrant of the dial like a hunting dog and then came to rest atnineteen degrees, just slightly to the left of the direction of theirtracks. An inner dial needle quivered between the yellow and red faceof the intensity meter.

"We should be within a couple of hundred yards of the marker now,"Troy announced as his short, chunky partner checked alongside. Alecnodded and peered through the curtain of sky-darkened snow just beyondthe rock face. He could see powder spume whipping off the ridge cresttwenty feet above them but the contour of the sloping ridge wasquickly lost in the falling snow.

The hydrologists leaned on their ski poles and rested for a fewminutes before tackling the final cold leg of their climb. Eachcarried a light, cold-resistance plastic ruckpac slung over theirchemically-heated light-weight ski suits.

A mile and a half below in the dense timber, their two Sno cars wereparked in the shelter of a flattened and fallen spruce and they hadthrown up a quick lean-to of broken boughs to give the vehicles evenmore protection from the storm. From there to the top, Troy was rightin his analysis of DivAg. When God made mountain slopes too steep andtimber too thick, it was a man and not a machine that had to do thejob on skis; just as snow surveyors had done a century before when theold Soil Conservation Service pioneered the new science of snowhydrology.

The science had come a long way in the century from the days whenteams of surveyors poked a hollow, calibrated aluminum tube into thesnow pack and then read depth and weighed both tube and contents todetermine moisture factors.

Those old-timers fought blizzards and avalanches from November throughMarch in the bleak, towering peaks of the Northwest to the weatheredcrags of the Appalachians, measuring thousands of predesignated snowcourses the last week of each winter month. Upon those readings hadbeen based the crude, wide-margin streamflow forecasts for the comingyear.

Now, a score of refined instruments did the same job automatically athundreds of thousands of almost-inaccessible locations throughout thenorthern hemisphere. Or at least, almost automatically. Twenty feetabove the two DivAg hydrologists and less than a hundred yards east,on the very crest of an unnamed peak in the wilderness of Idaho'sSawtooth Mountains, radiation snow gauge P11902-87 had quit sendingdata three days ago.

The snow-profile flight over the area showed a gap in the graphedline that flowed over the topographical map of the Sawtooths as thesurvey plane flew its daily scan. The hydrotech monitoring the graphreported the lapse to regional headquarters at Spokane and minuteslater, a communications operator punched up the alternate transmitterfor P11902-87. Nothing happened although the board showed the gauge'scobalt-60 beta and gamma still hot. Something had gone wrong with thetiny transducer transmitter. A man, or to be more precise, two men,had to replace the faulty device.

Troy and Alec pushed diagonally up the snow slope, pausing every fewminutes to take new directional readings. The needles were now atright angles to them and reading well into the "hot" red division ofthe intensity meter. They still were ten feet below the crest and acornice of snow hung out in a slight roof ahead of them. Both men hadclosed the face hatches of their insulated helmets and tinycirculators automatically went to work drawing off moisture andcondensation from the treated plastic.

"Wonder if that chunk is going to stay put while we go past," Aleccalled, eyeing the heavy overhang. Troy paused and the two carefullylooked over the snow roof and the slope that fell away sharply totheir right.

"Better extravagant with the taxpayers' money than sorry forourselves," Alec replied, pulling the avalanche gun from his holster.It looked like an early-day Very pistol, with its big, straight-boremuzzle. "Let's get back a couple of feet."

They kick-turned and skied back from the sides of the cornice. Alecraised the gun and aimed at the center of the deepest segment over theoverhang. The gun discharged with a muffled "pop" and the concentratedball of plastic explosive arced through the air, visible to the nakedeye. It vanished into the snow roof and the men waited. Ten secondslater there was a geyser of flame and the smoke and snow as the chargedetonated deep under the overhang. The wind whipped the cloud away andthe roof still held, despite the gaping hole.

"One more for good measure," Alec said as he fired again, this time tothe right of the first shot. The plastic detonated in another geyserof smoke and snow, but the small cloud was instantly lost as theentire overhang broke and fell the ten to twelve feet from the crestto the face of the slope and then boiled and rolled, gathering moresnow and greater mass and impetus as it thundered down the slope andwas lost in the storm. The dense clouds of loose powder snow raised bythe avalanche whipped away in the clutches of the wind.

They worked past the buried radiation gauge to the crest and thenturned and came slowly back along the wind ridge, following directlybehind the detection needle. Troy glanced at his intensity gauge. Theneedle was on the "danger" line in the red. He stopped. Behind him,Alec checked his drop slowly down the windward side of the slope,reading his own meter. When his intensity needle hit the same mark,he, too, halted about thirty feet to Troy's right.

"I've got it about forty-five degrees left," Alec called, marking hisposition and a direction line in the crust with a pole. Each movedtowards the other and from the mid-point of their two markingsextended with their eyes the imaginary lines to an intersecting pointsome thirty feet from Troy's original sighting.

With the tank slung under his arm and with nozzle in hand, Troy movedforward another ten feet, gauging the wind velocity. He aimed to thewindward of the intersecting lines and triggered the nozzle. A streamof liquid chemical melting agent shot out into the wind and thencurved back and cut a hole into the snow. Troy moved the nozzle in aslow arc, making a wide circle in the snow. Then he cut a trough onthe downhill side for more than twenty feet. He adjusted the nozzlehead and a wider stream sprayed out to fall within the already-meltingcircle. The concentrated solution was diluted with melting water andspread its action. As the hydrologists watched, the snow melted into adeep hole and the chemically-warmed water torrented down the drain cutto gush out on to the snow slope and quickly refreeze as it emergedinto the sub-zero air.

Then he began spraying a three-foot wide patch from the edge of thehole back towards himself. Immediately a new trough began to form inthe snow pack and the water poured off into the hole surrounding theburied gauge.

While the snow was melting, Alec had removed his skis and stuck themupright in the snow. He dropped his pack and unfastened a pair ofmountain-climber's ice crampons and lashed them to his ski boots. Infive minutes Troy had "burned" a sloping, ice-glazed ramp deep intothe snow field, sloping down into a ten-foot deep chasm andterminating on bare wet soil. Sitting on the ground, slightly offcenter to one side of the original hole was the foot-round gray metalshape of radiation snow gauge P11902-87. A half-inch round tubeprojected upwards for three inches from the center of the rounddevice.

Alec was down in the ice chasm, ski pole reversed in his hand.Standing as far from the gauge as possible, he dangled a leaden capfrom the end of his ski pole over the projecting tube. On the thirdtry, the cap descended over the open end of the tube, effectivelyshielding the radioactive source material in the gauge. Once the capwas in place, Alec moved up to the gauge and put a lock clamp on thecap and then picked up the gauge and moved back up the ramp.

He could barely make out the form of Troy fifty feet east of theoriginal position of the gauge. The tall engineer had taken thereplacement gauge from his pack and was positioning it into the snowon the surface of the snow pack. The replacement was bulkier than thedefective unit and it was different in design.

This was a combination radiation-sonar measuring gauge. Placed on topof an existing snow field, its sonar system kept account of the snowbeneath the gauge to the surface of the soil; the radiation countermetered the fresh snow that fell on it after it was placed inposition. The two readings were electronically added and fed into thetransducer for automatic transmission.

Troy hollowed out a slight depression in the fresh snow and pressedthe gauge into the hollow, then packed the snow back around it to keepit from being shifted by the high velocity winds until fresh snowsburied it. Satisfied that it was properly set, he removed theradiation cap lock and slipped his ski pole through the ring on thecap. He backed away, lifted the cap from the gauge and then quicklymoved out of the area.

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