Removing Huge Icy Dam To Drain Pond, Preventative Spring Flooding Measures

本站添加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, it is still the first week of April 2026.

[00:00:07]Look at the trees. We got some freezing rain. Just like if you saw my last video, it was starting to get a lot of freezing rain. Well, last night it actually rained for a while and then it started getting cold again. That's why we have a little bit of slush that's returned to the roads. And you see all the trees have a little layer of ice on them. So, we did actually get a good amount of rain last night. I drove most of the night. Slept at home. Coming back up. I wanted to grab a few of my tools, get some more marking tape.

[00:00:46]So, now we're going to spend some more time out here.

[00:00:49]But, it's going to be a few weeks before most of these roads are even open. Like the road we're on now has been plowed, but a lot of the higher elevation roads, you just can't make them down it right now. But we're returning. We got an axe.

[00:01:02]We're going to try to open up that covert a bit more that we failed at a couple of days ago. But I don't like leaving jobs incomplete. I want to open that up so when we do start getting some bad spring thaws, it has somewhere to go. I'm pretty sure the surface of that pond is still going to be frozen. If it miraculously isn't, the warmer weather in the forecast will allow us to completely open it. When there's ice on the ponds, we don't completely remove beaver dams until they're trapped.

[00:01:34]But we'll see. I have no idea what's up here. The weather up here, 6 hours north of where I live, is always completely different.

[00:01:43]There's absolutely no snow, and there hasn't been for a couple of weeks where I live. But up here, snow is going to disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear this time of year.

[00:01:55]Growing season up here is not until June 15th. It can historically snow in June, and it will often snow in May.

[00:02:04]All right, conditions are rapidly getting worse as we gain elevation. Look at those frost heaves. The road is getting a bit icy, but not slippery yet where we need four-wheel drive. The ice on the trees is getting heavier.

[00:02:18]So this time of year, this is why the roads need constant inspections. We were literally here three days ago. All the new rain has caused brand new frost heaves.

[00:02:32]Look at this. This was not here. That one right there was not here a couple of days ago. We got to mark that.

[00:02:43]That ice melting is really beautiful.

[00:02:47]It's all falling out of the trees as it slightly gets warmer because it's still early in the morning now. See how bad this frost heave is.

[00:02:57]That is not good for a big log truck to hit.

[00:03:02]So, when we see anything like that, we mark it because the trucks are running.

[00:03:07]Only at night, though, because during the day, these roads get soft.

[00:03:14]Ah, that someone's not that bad.

[00:03:21]All right, I just stopped on this section of road. There's a culvert here in this ditch. We've unclogged this one before. The grater has pushed it in and we had to shovel it out. At the moment, we don't know where it is. It's still not late enough in the year to do proper ditch and covert inspections, but it will not flood this road.

[00:03:43]And the only purpose of that cover being there is to decrease erosion coming into the river so close to the road because you see this ditch literally overflows right into this creek.

[00:04:00]So you would think maybe it's pointless and kind of is cuz you see the ditch is just continuing over here without flooding.

[00:04:09]You see this time of year, the water's literally flowing on top of the ice.

[00:04:17]Not enough space under the ice right now. That's That's pretty cool to see.

[00:04:22]All right, we're going to continue.

[00:04:25]What are you doing out here on uh mud season? That sort of car.

[00:04:32]You're not from around here. That's a Wow, they have a Connecticut plate.

[00:04:37]Connecticut's a two uh two plate state.

[00:04:42]They're missing the front one.

[00:04:45]I think that I think they have just decided. Yeah, they're turning around.

[00:04:49]They're not going to continue anymore.

[00:04:51]In this video, you're going to probably see how bad these roads get. You need four-wheel drive where we're going once we get to these higher elevations. This is no longer going to be slushy. It is going to become ice.

[00:05:11]Yeah, that car realized a mistake. We're only a couple miles from the pavement right at this point, but we're going to eventually by tonight get over a 100 miles deep into the wilderness.

[00:05:24]Okay, we got to back up again. It just started snowing. Look at this. We got a frost heave that is not marked. There's blue ribbons right there. So, there was some sort of problem with the water.

[00:05:38]Let's get out real quick and keep our ears open. There shouldn't be really any traffic out here. All righty. Put up some more noticeable ribbons there.

[00:05:49]There will be some frost heaves that are so bad it's going to be difficult to get a sports car over them.

[00:06:00]Yep, we've reached that time of the day.

[00:06:03]shifting into four-wheel drive. It is now starting to get slippery. And we haven't even got two miles away from where that car was turning around. So, Whoa. Whoa. That is a bad bad one. We got to get out. Mark that.

[00:06:20]We're now in the areas where you will slide if you have to slam on your brakes.

[00:06:26]Okay, we're in a straightaway, so I'll have a moment of warning just in case.

[00:06:40]There we go.

[00:06:44]It's really only affecting that side.

[00:06:57]Wow, the potholes are so many times worse than just a couple days ago. Couple days ago, this was snowpacked.

[00:07:06]It all melted during the rains and a couple days of warm weather. These potholes, many of these were probably already here. You just couldn't feel them. It was so smooth a couple of days.

[00:07:17]Whoa. Yep, there's ice.

[00:07:19]We're even slipping in four-wheel drive.

[00:07:25]Don't ever bring a two-w wheelel drive car in these areas unless it's perfect summer conditions.

[00:07:53]All right. I'm sure you just saw me get out a couple of times in that time lapse to mark some things. Look what we got right here in the middle of the road.

[00:08:01]That's going to have to get removed if it doesn't recede. That is a huge rock right in the middle of the road. Frost will push those up and sometimes they'll stay up if sediment fills in that gap.

[00:08:17]where the frost lifted or sometimes it'll erode more sediment than it had and it'll recede down too far leaving a huge hole.

[00:08:27]So you get those sometimes log truck's not going to hit that. They got enough clearance. I'm not worried about that. We're out here to make these roads safe for heavy duty trucks, not a sports car.

[00:08:44]These are all private logging roads. And you can see right here, look, there's a lot of rudded up areas from the big trucks right here. That's why they don't run them during the day. We had a few very warm days. But at some point this month, they're going to suspend all the trucks until these roads start hardening up after mud season. But getting out and hanging up those ribbons on these ice covered trees, that is so satisfying.

[00:09:14]But this ice is beautiful.

[00:09:19]I just found one that I absolutely can't ignore. And look at that moose tracks.

[00:09:23]Those are very fresh moose tracks. I have to mark this. There's another rock that got lifted up. And I know these roads by heart. This was not here last summer, but at some point somebody spray painted it orange, but you're not really going to see that.

[00:09:41]So, I need to mark this better. Look at the ice. That is so beautiful.

[00:09:48]Watch this.

[00:09:54]I love freezing rain.

[00:09:58]Oh, that feels so cool falling down on me.

[00:10:03]We were supposed to get three to five inches of snow in this area today. Maybe they did further north where I'm going, but instead we got an ice storm. I like it.

[00:10:15]I'm not worried about it. We got chains if worse comes to worse.

[00:10:20]All right, we just flagged that and a fuel truck.

[00:10:23]People sometimes forget during my videos, even though this portion of Maine only has 800 residents in 25% of the state, people do in fact live in the wilderness. And fuel trucks do have to come out here. You got to order your fuel before the worst of mud season cuz those drivers will refuse to come out to your house in the wilderness. And you do have to pay a lot to get them out there in the first place.

[00:10:48]Yeah. If you need propane for cooking or heating, you got to get it now because there's always like a month-long period.

[00:10:58]You can't have heavy trucks on these roads. It just becomes a mud hole for a bit. I know even my driveway, I can't have a fuel delivery or anything for at least another month. But I I thankfully got fuel delivered before heating oil jumped to now about $5. It doubled its price in the past month.

[00:11:24]But I'm okay. I don't have to order it again until next winter. Hopefully prices are back down.

[00:11:30]All right, only a couple more minutes down the road. We're starting to get a good snow pack again in the woods. And I bet at some of the higher elevations on these roads, there's still going to be multiple feet in the middle of the road.

[00:11:45]But we are approaching our area again, about to pull back up on scene in the next minute or so.

[00:11:54]I didn't even happen to notice if that fuel truck there was using its chains.

[00:12:01]You can't really see them. you'd have to more more so listen to them. Those fuel trucks usually have automatic chains.

[00:12:10]That is a device that's usually powered by air pressure. It's spinning underneath. They're throwing links of chain underneath the wheels so you don't have to keep putting them on and off.

[00:12:21]That's very good because you'll be driving on the main roads, no ice, and you have to keep going into customers driveways and you just flip a switch and it protects you from sliding.

[00:12:34]I think that's a good idea.

[00:12:40]All right, pulling back up on scene and there's water trickling down those tire ruts. That's going to get worse until they grade it.

[00:12:51]Look at this mud. This wasn't here just a couple days ago either. Some of the trucks are really sinking deep.

[00:13:00]Okay, it's 34° or 1° C. More moose tracks here. There's our blue ribbons.

[00:13:09]Yep, the beaver pond's still frozen. So, we will only manage this slightly until the water levels or until the waters open free of ice. We don't go ahead and completely remove dams. We will mitigate horrific damage to the roads caused by those pipes being blocked. We want to get it at least halfway open so flood waters have somewhere to go in the coming weeks.

[00:13:40]All right, everyone. When we arrived on scene, we were here two days ago. Here, the snow in the middle is so high I've been hitting it. I don't think they plowed this road. It has really melted out. Two days ago, I was like, "Wow, they didn't even plow this." It was very deep, actually. There was a hump in the middle of ice 8 in tall that all melted out from the warm weather and rain. And now it got cold again. Got the big high boots on, pulled over so anything could get around me when I'm in the pipe.

[00:14:14]You wouldn't even notice anyone driving over. Got some squirrel tracks, some moose tracks further up here. Lots of good wildlife in the area.

[00:14:25]Those ribbons I just put up a few days ago.

[00:14:28]You put up blue when there's a water hazard. You don't put up orange or pink unless it's a hazard directly to the road. But they always install coververt pipes higher up. That's designed to flood if it absolutely has to. But that's also a huge environmental impact for downstream.

[00:14:46]If we can get this open a bit, lower this down a couple of feet, the beavers won't be affected by that because those lodges are designed for fluctuations.

[00:14:58]And this time of year, once this ice is gone, it can't really reform. I'm kind of surprised it's still frozen with the amount of current here.

[00:15:09]There's more current than there was a couple days ago because it's been warmer. We're the ones who cut this cavity, but that was frozen. There was an ice dam we were chopping out of there with the rake and that just wasn't working. We brought the axe today, but is it even necessary?

[00:15:26]Yeah, it is. It's still frozen in there.

[00:15:29]I didn't see that.

[00:15:32]So, we'll get camera number two.

[00:15:34]And we also got a second covert that's blocked. We might end up leaving that one for warmer weather.

[00:15:45]Hey, the geese are already flying north.

[00:15:49]This is a normal winter for Maine. It's supposed to be cold still, but last year everything got warm a month early. It was unusual to see the trees grow leaves up here in May.

[00:16:00]Usually you don't see leaves up in these elevations until June.

[00:16:06]And it might happen again this year. Be a little early. There's buds.

[00:16:14]Yep, definitely flowing more. Let's get ready and go in there. We got a lot of traffic today. I just had to jump back in so mud wouldn't get splashed in.

[00:16:24]Last time we were out here, we went over a full day, drove like 300 miles on these roads. Not a single person. We saw three vehicles today.

[00:16:38]Fuel truck, a guy who thought twice, and that's one of another that's another logger.

[00:16:48]Okay, we got fireman X. Got the rake camera number two. I love how their beaver lodge has a tree growing right out of the middle.

[00:17:01]So, last time when we went down here two days ago, I was worried about stepping onto the river ice cuz you don't know how deep it is under there. Look at that. The Those are my footprints. You can't even see my footprints from a couple days ago.

[00:17:18]Non tree. Stop that.

[00:17:28]Okay, we stepped onto this ice the other day, but I got to not drop anything. And I think I need to install magnets onto my rake and axe so I can stick them somewhere.

[00:17:45]Oh, this ice is giving. I hear it cracking.

[00:17:48]Let's get on to solid ground.

[00:18:04]I always get somebody commenting that I'm such an evil person for unclogging pipes.

[00:18:11]What do you think something blocking 80% of the pipe is going to do during flood season?

[00:18:20]So, we were out here earlier in the week and we couldn't get that ice out of here.

[00:18:38]All right, everyone. Camera number two is going Heat. Heat.

[00:19:07]Heat.

[00:19:26]Heat.

[00:19:52]This is really cold at first.

[00:19:56]Then I get used to it.

[00:19:59]Heat.

[00:20:15]Heat.

[00:20:39]Heat.

[00:20:41]Heat.

[00:20:46]Heat.

[00:20:59]Heat.

[00:21:20]Heat. Heat.

[00:21:29]Heat up here.

[00:22:12]Heat. Heat.

[00:22:20]Heat.

[00:22:36]Heat.

[00:23:11]This is going too Well, I'm moving these cameras in case we get it to the point I can't come back in here. So, I'm going to move over here, camera number two, to the very end where I can reach in and get it.

[00:23:26]So, what's better, an angle looking out or back in?

[00:23:36]I personally think back in is better.

[00:23:43]Yeah.

[00:23:45]Leave you right here where I should get the camera in case we can't get it out of here.

[00:24:01]I'm just preparing in case this gets to the point it's unsafe to return in the pipe because this is going quite fast compared to without the axe.

[00:24:15]So, I'm going to put the other camera where you can see me in here.

[00:24:21]Climb up on this. Very, very cold touching this stuff, but the blood always gets pumping to my hands relatively fast. So, put you there. Can you see enough?

[00:24:35]Maybe more tilted. I can't even see the screen at this weird angle.

[00:24:42]Um, I'm in the way. I can't see the angle at all.

[00:24:51]Yeah, that's good for now.

[00:24:56]Heat.

[00:25:09]Heat.

[00:25:29]Heat.

[00:25:35]Heat.

[00:25:49]The ice is only on the top.

[00:26:12]We might be done with the axe. I'm going to place it up on top of the ice.

[00:26:24]Yeah, it's just a hard seller. We got rid of it.

[00:26:31]Heat. Heat.

[00:27:04]Heat.

[00:27:11]Heat.

[00:27:34]Heat up here.

[00:27:40]Heat up here.

[00:28:07]Heat.

[00:28:25]Heat.

[00:28:31]Heat.

[00:28:51]Heat.

[00:29:07]Heat.

[00:29:15]Heat.

[00:29:20]Heat up here.

[00:29:56]Heat.

[00:30:01]Heat.

[00:30:20]Heat. Heat.

[00:30:37]is frozen because the ground in the road is very frozen. These areas freeze down over 6 ft.

[00:30:45]So, this is very frozen against the edges deep into the dam.

[00:30:55]I might have to get the axe again now that we got down some more of it.

[00:31:04]This stuff has been frozen into the edges making difficult to get out.

[00:31:29]All right, we're getting to that point.

[00:31:50]I'm going to start working from outside.

[00:31:55]Current is really strong right now. Oh, come on.

[00:32:06]Oh, come on.

[00:32:10]Yeah, that's why we're coming outside. I just want to free up some of the edges a little bit cuz I have to be in here for that.

[00:32:34]Heat.

[00:32:46]Heat.

[00:33:04]There's not enough swinging radius in here.

[00:33:34]Heat. Heat.

[00:33:56]Ow.

[00:33:58]I like got a funny bone or something weird there.

[00:34:04]Bad vibration just came up the handle.

[00:34:30]No, that's that's my arthritis kicking in. I can't keep holding that axe.

[00:34:41]All right, we'll work from the outside a little bit now.

[00:34:56]How do you want to be angled?

[00:35:03]See if we can get anything from here.

[00:35:07]It's easier to work below the dam until the current gets strong because right now I'm fighting the current and the weight of the debris.

[00:35:19]It's not nice.

[00:35:22]A lot harder on your back from being up on top of this.

[00:35:29]You see the dam is literally frozen to the sides because up in these climates freezes into the ground over 6 ft a little less if it's water logged.

[00:35:49]See, this is what I was trying to get with the axe. It's still very frozen.

[00:35:53]Not hard to do, but I guess after holding the steering wheel for like already 7 hours today and yesterday probably 14 16.

[00:36:09]Yeah, it's making it act up today.

[00:36:14]The dam still feels frozen down to a extent, but remember the goal from the start is only partially removing this.

[00:36:25]All right, let's see. Can we get anything from this side now?

[00:36:36]Hard to get an angle from here.

[00:36:47]I guess that'll work. It won't.

[00:36:53]Come on. This tripod just does not have the angle I'm looking for.

[00:37:02]This is loose and not frozen. Get some of that.

[00:37:16]The dam continues across both pipes.

[00:37:20]That's not frozen. This mud has a lot of good bacteria that will help it generate heat. That's why that's not frozen.

[00:37:36]here cracking across the pond as we're lowering it now over 2 ft.

[00:38:07]Heat.

[00:38:19]Heat.

[00:38:39]This is not a difficult one.

[00:38:43]Now that Did I just hear a crack on the tripod?

[00:38:49]Now that this is opened up halfway, we have drastically minimized the flood impact from the beavers. While they still will have plenty of water until spring comes, this is probably going to be melted in the next week or so. Let's have some fun. I hear plenty of cracking happening.

[00:39:14]It sucks flooding the boots. Day one.

[00:39:18]We're still gonna be out here for the majority of the week. But it's okay. I'm used to it. It's how it is every year.

[00:39:26]We did accelerate this a lot. Here's what it looked like before.

[00:39:32]And here's what it looks like now. We've even created, look at all those suds.

[00:39:38]That's from organic debris, rotting plants, poop mixes up into a foam.

[00:39:48]All natural though. It just started snowing. Nice. Look at that.

[00:39:54]Maybe we will end up getting the snow on top of the freezing rain now that the temperatures are starting to drop. I want to break some of this ice. Got to have some fun while we're out here.

[00:40:15]I want to go start camera number two back up for this. That'll be really fun.

[00:40:24]Got to get it out back in my pocket.

[00:40:37]All right, camera number two is on.

[00:40:58]We haven't got to do one of these in a while. This will be fun.

[00:41:24]You would not want to get hit in your legs by these if they started coming in while working in there. They pick up speed fast.

[00:41:36]Wow, look how thick some of this ice is.

[00:41:39]I could probably still walk out there.

[00:41:44]Wow, that's thick.

[00:42:01]much thinner where the water's been moving.

[00:42:31]Oh, there's multiple layers of it. The ice upstream broke and slid underneath here. That's what this is. A whole independent layer.

[00:42:59]that's in the process of melting. So, it has give to it, like sort of slushy. If it was hard ice and it was really cold, it would shatter much easier.

[00:43:23]I got to show you some of these going down the waterfall.

[00:43:28]Looks incredible.

[00:43:31]Let me break off one more huge one.

[00:43:37]Imagine getting hit by that.

[00:44:13]Heat. Heat.

[00:44:45]Last one.

[00:44:47]Oh, that was hard to break off.

[00:44:51]Check it out.

[00:44:56]Some of this that's not the bottom. It's really thick. 10 in or so.

[00:45:05]Awesome.

[00:45:15]Preventative maintenance.

[00:45:18]Beavers literally cannot repair that.

[00:45:21]They need the surface of the water to float over materials.

[00:45:25]They literally can't fix that until the surface melts. And they're not huge on building until it gets warmer.

[00:45:34]They don't really like building dams or doing maintenance when the water and everything's still cold. They will, but they need motivation such as a complete damn failure.

[00:46:05]Heat. Heat.

[00:46:32]What the I'm sore now.

[00:47:10]That's kind of cool.

[00:47:12]That's kind of cool.

[00:47:14]Check that out.

[00:47:16]A debris dam caught all the ice we just broke.

[00:47:21]Next flood will take it away. I always find it ridiculous. Look how big the riverbed is. And look how big the flood plane is.

[00:47:29]Makes you wonder why they don't put a bridge in some of these spots. It's snowing and it just looks absolutely beautiful.

[00:47:37]It's cold enough that'll probably start accumulating quickly. Sun's not very strong today, it being cloudy. But if it's sunny, no matter if it's below freezing or not, it's strong this time of year. The sun, I hear lots of cracking. So satisfying.

[00:47:56]It's better, like I said, when the ice is hard. This ice is very unpredictable, uneven. It's so thin in the middle there because there's current melting it off to the sides where it's still it's very thick. I could probably get away with walking through there, but I'm not going to take my chances.

[00:48:17]But believe me, the beavers are well aware of this. They can definitely hear the ice cracking and feel the water dropping. But it'll drop about 2 feet.

[00:48:27]Good for the spring thaw. I know everyone gets disappointed when when we don't completely remove them. We probably could completely remove this in stages. Not a big pond. Wait an hour, lower it down more, wait another hour, lower it down more, so you're not dealing with extreme current. But today, that's not the game plan. I will not harm the beavers for views. Even though it's completely legal humanely, I'm not doing that.

[00:48:59]When you're removing dams like this on private property, no law says you can't do this during the colder weather or how you manage the beavers out on these forestry roads. Even though they're private property, it is still patrolled by rangers. The rangers have talked to me many times. One of the first times before I got to know a lot of them. Like now they'll even tell me in the summertime where some of these are because they like watching my videos too, it appears.

[00:49:30]And the first time the ranger got out immediately and he said, um, "Please show me your u trapping license."

[00:49:40]And I had to explain because he, you know, he thought he sees the waiters, he sees me at a beaver swamp, he knows I'm not fishing, but he was like, "That's a new one.

[00:49:52]removing beaver dams and setting up cameras overnight. He's never seen that before, but he thought it was cool.

[00:49:59]Be careful, have fun, carry on. And he left.

[00:50:03]That was cool.

[00:50:09]But yeah, these are private roads, but they are patrolled.

[00:50:14]And the rule out here is if the state or government gets to them first, they're oftent times relocated out west to help with droughts and flood planes destroyed by humans cuz beavers add life to the deserts.

[00:50:34]But if they can't get to them on time and the beavers keep destroying these roads, they will get shot by the logging company, unfortunately. So, I like to think if we can get out here and manage the problems that the beavers are causing, then the logging company isn't motivated to hunt them off. And it gives them a better chance to get actually relocated during the better months because what I just did is going to prevent that from becoming a nuisance through the spring thaw over the next couple of weeks.

[00:51:10]That's the way I see it. Anyways, that is not part of my job. I just do that for fun while out here working on these roads.

[00:51:23]Flagging is what my job actually is out here. Marking hazards that could knock logs off the trucks.

[00:51:33]This is a very slippery section of road.

[00:51:35]There is still good snow pack here in the road. I put those ribbons up two days ago. That's an early warning symbol for the log trucks because there's a huge frost heave around the corner.

[00:51:48]That's to get you to slow down. Let's see how it's doing.

[00:51:53]As spring thaw progresses, we will take some of those back down because as Here it is still here. Very prevalent. Look at that. Couple frost heaves in a row. Wow. That one had a little ice on it. I could feel. and we marked it in the other direction.

[00:52:13]Yeah, cuz those frost heaves, just like I was mentioning, some of the ones we just flagged today were not a problem two days ago. As it rains, it creates more heaving, more ripples as the water freezes inside the road. And then as time goes on, they'll eventually most of them naturally recede and don't need to be scraped off or leveled. But all the potholes, they will grade these roads multiple times during the warmer months.

[00:52:39]See, no one wants to run over this rough stuff.

[00:52:43]And some of these companies actually will purposely keep the road in bad condition the first couple of miles from the pavement to discourage people from coming out here with two-w wheelel drive or sedans. And then once you get out there a couple miles, they actually for the most part drastically improve by preventing a lot of traffic from getting out there.

[00:53:08]Because in Maine, most of these are open to your own risk for the public for hunting, camping, all kinds of stuff.

[00:53:16]If you wreck your vehicle, it was at your own risk. But it's in a nuisance having people go after these companies thinking they have a right to the damages that they caused to their own car. That's very unfortunate though.

[00:53:31]So that is why a lot of the outskirts near the towns the companies will mark in they'll literally post their land.

[00:53:38]You cannot go on this.

[00:53:41]But everything deep deep out there, that's all still open, which is nice.

[00:53:50]Look at this part of the road. There's no ice. Around every dark corner is ice.

[00:53:57]On every hill there's ice. And there's mud holes at the lower spots.

[00:54:07]That's flagged right there because you might not realize there's a ditch there in the winter. If you like pull over there, you're gonna fall right into there. That's the reason why that one's marked. There's some more frost heaves.

[00:54:19]Oh, wow.

[00:54:22]Wow. That's like a That's a bad one. If I was going faster. The speed limit here is 45. I'm not even doing half of that, but some of those big trucks will be.

[00:54:31]Believe it or not, this time of year, you cannot keep up with the semi trucks.

[00:54:36]They're so heavy. They push down through that mud and get awesome traction. So, they go full speed. And that will knock some logs off if they don't see that. I don't know if you can tell that frost heave. I got to get out and show you.

[00:54:48]It's so bad. Let me get my ribbon.

[00:54:52]Yeah. I don't know if you can tell.

[00:54:54]That is where the road's supposed to be.

[00:54:56]This part has frost that has lifted it up. Can you see that right there?

[00:55:03]There's a good two feet from there to here. It's a big ripple. That's not good. And you're also going to notice how part of the road here is lower.

[00:55:16]Ground water has been moving underneath this snow bank. So, it's very soft if you pull over. You can literally get stuck if you pull over this time of year over onto these edges.

[00:55:27]Edges are very soft. Very careful pulling over. or I've got stuck multiple times. Pull onto the shoulder very slowly. In case you start sinking, you can back up. Look at that. Nice big piece of quartz. I like that.

[00:55:43]All right.

[00:55:45]This also was not here a couple days ago either. The ground is very actively shifting around, but hopefully that gets someone to slow down so they don't run into a problem.

[00:55:57]We haven't really approached get stuck every day season yet. But I've already serviced my winch, rolled it out, rolled it back in, lubricated it. So, we're ready if we do get stuck. Made sure all that's working. Cleaned out its plug cuz you have to plug in a joystick and control it.

[00:56:18]That's how my winch works. The one I got, unfortunately, there was no way to hook it up inside with a switch. I tried. They didn't make the part. So, if I ever get one in the future, it will be absolutely a different brand. If you're someone that wants to control the winch inside, don't get Rough Country because you have to literally open the hood, plug into the back side of it, close the hood so you can see, bring it in through the window or door, and control it while you're helping with the gas. I don't like that setup. So, I will not buy a Rough Country winch ever again. I have a Rough Country winch inside of a steel bumper. And I have a push bar set that's made to go on a Ford because Toyota doesn't make push bars that are functional. They only make ones just for show. And that's not going to help you if you hit a deer or have a pull out in front of you.

[00:57:12]The ones just for show arguably cause more damage if you hit something small.

[00:57:16]That thing bends like a tin can into all your stuff.

[00:57:22]But we also we did touchups. Metal bumpers have to be painted every single year when you live in the rust belt.

[00:57:29]Pebbles knock off the paint. Road salt makes it all turn orange and look horrible. But it's not really hard. You just sand it with a grinder. I use a metal brush grinder. Then I paint it with Rustoleum. And you're good. You're good for a year. Not It's not too hard.

[00:57:47]Only takes about an hour or two a year.

[00:57:50]in maintenance. I used to spray paint it, which took forever cuz you had to mask off the whole front and back end of the truck for those metal bumpers. I have completely removed the crumple zone of this truck. Wow, the snow is really beautiful today.

[00:58:07]You can't even see that hazard until you're right up on it. How do we flag one like this? Well, I'm going to put up some ribbons on the trees, but I'm also going to go find a good stick to jam in here with a ribbon on the top of it also.

[00:58:21]And it's probably just going to get worse. A rock got pushed up through the surface and it has receded back down further than it originated because it looks like over here might also start opening up. That's a very big rock. It only just caved in in one spot, but it looks like it's going to be considerably bigger as this road continues to thaw.

[00:58:43]So frost lifted it up before it lowered back down. ground water, removed sediment, and now it left a big hole. I got to find a stick.

[00:58:52]All right, there we go. That was actually very easy to jam in the hole, which is concerning. That means it's going to get much bigger. Usually, it's pretty frozen. And we got a tire cutter here. Imagine pulling over into that.

[00:59:04]It's a piece of iron. It'll rust away, but that's a piece of an old culvert.

[00:59:09]Probably got sheared off by the grater.

[00:59:13]I like those better, but they are more hazardous when you find them in that sort of situation compared to plastic.

[00:59:21]But at least metal will last out here a good 30 years instead of a couple months. Garbage plastic covers. See, I'm also looking for stuff like this. See those stress marks?

[00:59:34]The ground's still frozen, but the rain and melt is going to get into that. And one of these plates is going to lift up.

[00:59:42]We also have another rock right here.

[00:59:45]Not horrible yet.

[00:59:49]Yeah, that's probably going to get worse. That's another rock, but might be something for another week.

[00:59:57]Not going to mark it quite yet. Not yet.

[01:00:01]But we patrol these roads every two weeks for the next two months. If this amount of stuff can pop up in two days, imagine how much is going to pop up in two weeks the next time we ride through here.

[01:00:17]That was a little more time consuming. I usually don't shut the truck off if we're only out for five minutes, but I thought it was going to take longer to find a stick.

[01:00:27]It wasn't.

[01:00:31]That's pretty easy.

[01:00:45]Oh my gosh. It doesn't even look slippery. I just could not stop right there. And I had a bunch of things go flying because I have like snacks on my passenger seat.

[01:00:56]This was a bad frost heave and I just could not stop approaching it. There's lots of hidden ice. This one needs to be marked, too. That's pretty bad. All right, we just hang up some ribbons to get people to slow down.

[01:01:09]We got something going on. So, the other side right there, it looks like there's a lot of erosion approaching this culvert. That That's possible that's not a frost heave. It could be a rotted out pipe that is allowing sediment around it to get washed out and sink. Could be too much snow on the sides of it to inspect. Couple weeks if we determine it's completely destroyed, we will flag it with blue. Also, now it's just marked as a hazard. Not exactly a water problem yet.

[01:01:50]This road looks like just slush, but it is actually insanely slippery.

[01:02:00]Yeah, you're not getting good traction here today. Not at all.

[01:02:05]It's a pretty slippery day beneath all that slush.

[01:02:42]All right, this is one we flagged two days ago.

[01:02:45]We put these ribbons up right here because these are some bad ones.

[01:02:50]Really bad ones. You might see in the time lapse the hood moving around, but unless it's abrupt, you can't really flag them all. There's just so many smaller ones, especially the ones around corners. If they're bad, we give a good early warning ribbons.

[01:03:08]But around tight corners, if it's just so so, you should already be going slow around these corners. Oh, that one wasn't there the other day. We have to stop for that one. That was That's worse than I thought. And it looks like there's even more up here, too. So, we got to take a walk.

[01:03:27]I can't tell you how many times even my own ribbons have saved me out here. And any other ribbons that are put up by anyone, employees or just random people, they're very helpful.

[01:03:41]Like these roads are icy right now.

[01:03:43]They're slow going. Not a huge deal. But think about in a couple weeks when these aren't ice covered. People are going to return to that 45 mph speed limit. And these flags save you from horrible suspension damage when these things come out of nowhere. Those frost heaves will be there long after the snow and ice melt because they they have to thaw out deep into the ground to disappear.

[01:04:12]Wow, look at these frost heaves. Check this out. Watch the hood.

[01:04:20]There's another one. Another one. This is just a covert.

[01:04:46]All right, I'm having fun on this road.

[01:04:48]See this? If you go over to the edge a little bit, It just trying to get Oh, there we go.

[01:04:57]It just throws slush all over the windshield.

[01:05:02]How do I do that?

[01:05:04]The wheels got to be slightly crooked.

[01:05:07]How do I get it to do that again?

[01:05:12]It's so fun getting the truck all muddy out here.

[01:05:21]Since I started oil undercoating, you don't have to pressure wash underneath.

[01:05:26]Mud does not stick to oil undercoating, which is awesome for ease of cleaning.

[01:05:34]There we go.

[01:05:36]I love hearing that noise.

[01:05:51]This is so much fun.

[01:05:55]I love days like this. Most people don't.

[01:06:01]What do we got there?

[01:06:04]I think we got beaver issues. I see marks.

[01:06:09]We got something.

[01:06:12]What do we got? Someone marked it. And I like how they marked it on just one side. I probably would have marked it on both, but they did that because beavers aren't going to really be cutting down that side. They're going to keep cutting this side down. Someone's been here looking at the pipe. Literally just today.

[01:06:33]Looks like someone was literally chipping away at this. Is there more culverts? I hear dripping. And there's a dam there.

[01:06:43]How big of a problem we looking at.

[01:06:53]Ah, yeah. That's That's very frozen.

[01:06:57]Can't get that with the rake. And there's not enough room in there to swing an axe.

[01:07:02]Sure there's a beaver lodge in here somewhere, but unless I'm sure or not sure, I'm not going to touch that. But this will be on our radar. If the logging company doesn't get this before that thaws, we'll get it.

[01:07:20]There's another one down there, too. I really don't need to look at it. Same problem. Guaranteed. It's still frozen.

[01:07:30]Guaranteed. Whoever hung this up did it a while ago. There's no footprints over here. And also, if this ice is thick, we start releasing that, it's going to get stuck on all that ice. And look, they have a secondary dam. Beavers will have multiple dams throughout a river valley.

[01:07:47]That's why they're so important to the environment and why the government relocates them out west, creating all these ponds along streams through the desert. What that does is ponds are heavy. That's pushing down with a lot of pressure. It really helps recharge the aquafer. A stream doesn't do much, but a bunch of heavy beaver reservoirs, awesome for recharging water aquifers out west. That's why they're always trying to relocate them.

[01:08:17]But you can't tell a private land owner land owner they can't take care of a pest. You can't do that. Heading back out. Yeah, these exact pipes were a problem last year. Who knows that those could be very well my ribbons and the ribbons on the other side could have been stolen by the beaver when they took the tree to build that dam back. We absolutely have been to those culverts last fall, but I think it was so late in the season I was like, you know what?

[01:08:48]I'm not going to touch it.

[01:09:16]Wow, elevation is so varying. Look up there on that hill. All the freezing rain. It looks beautiful.

[01:09:23]But we're not there. We might be later.

[01:09:27]We might get to further elevation. Just look at the snow pack in the woods.

[01:09:30]There's multiple feet still up here. It still very much looks like winter up here in early April.

[01:09:39]Last year was a much warmer spring. We did have flurries and light snow. I remember I was filming in early May.

[01:09:46]Hey, it's snowing out. That was specifically in the video where we were camping in the concrete cube that we found out here.

[01:09:56]Yeah, it was snowing in that video early May. So, it can. It's just a lot colder this year. Last year, most of this snow pack wasn't still here.

[01:10:10]We are quickly climbing elevation and the temperature is dropping.

[01:10:17]We climbed the necessary elevation in literally a minute. All it took was going up a steep hill and we're all the way up in this already. It looks beautiful. There's a covert coming up that's usually frozen and it causes a flood over the road until it thaws coming up.

[01:10:35]Where is it? Oh, there it is actually.

[01:10:38]Yeah, the water was literally cross crossing there. That's what all that slush was.

[01:10:45]We're now 32 miles away from the pavement and we got 5 hours left until the sun goes down.

[01:10:57]When you're driving in slush or mud, horrible gas mileage, it takes a lot more power to go through this kind of stuff. It bogs you down.

[01:11:07]We're only achieving 11 MPG. When we were out here only a couple of days ago, we were achieving about 18 19 MPG because they weren't slushy like this.

[01:11:18]We were literally driving on top of snowpack, which was smooth, very little resistance.

[01:11:25]Wow, things have very well changed in the past couple of days.

[01:11:33]All right, we just went down a hill and now the freezing rain is gone again out in the trees.

[01:11:39]So, when we're off-road driving and high RPM to go through mud and stuff, I do oil changes more often. Usually I'll do 5 10,000 miles if it's on the highway, but these conditions, they're going to change it when I get back at the end of the week. We're not going to push it past 3,000 miles. A lot more frequent oil changes I do in these sort of conditions. It's a lot more wear and tear.

[01:12:09]An oil change only takes five minutes.

[01:12:11]Very easy to do yourself.

[01:12:14]I definitely suggest people learn that because I've had so many mechanics literally destroy oil pans by overtightening.

[01:12:31]Wow, this road is wow. Look at these.

[01:12:34]These are bad. But when they're one after another like that, we don't mark them. We figure out where the end of they is and we will mark that as a warning to coming up to them all. You don't mark them individually when there's so many. And once it ends sort of, that's when we'll put a bunch of ribbons up to slow you down.

[01:12:57]All right. These ribbons right here, this is another pipe that likes to freeze solid, and it hasn't happened yet, but I think they expect it to. Those ribbons even have the company name marked on them. That's interesting. Now, this one right here also freezes.

[01:13:22]Does that say the company name?

[01:13:27]Um, no, no, no. That one was actually literally marked by the Department of Natural Resources, it says.

[01:13:38]All right. This one was marked by the logging company. It doesn't have the DNR marks on it. The DNR has been very pleasant to call and talk to before about certain beaver issues. They're really on top of relocating beavers.

[01:13:53]Remember remember the Connecticut beaver swamp? I found that a very cruel situation. The state of Connecticut kept unclogging it, removing their pond repeatedly, but never any attempt to relocate the beaver. I thought that was incredibly cruel. Within a week, the beavers were properly relocated by the DNR. If you have a problem with them, the beavers, call the DNR. They'll take care of you very nicely. All righty.

[01:14:21]I'll take my lunch break now. I don't like to sit still, but we found a nice place that we can investigate while I have a quick snack and gain energy.

[01:14:35]What we got here? Coyote tracks. Maybe maybe links. They're a little too melted to really tell. All right, we have a brand new beaver lodge, which was not in this location before.

[01:14:50]Ooh.

[01:14:52]Good thing I checked. I just knew there had to be a problem because of them. And you see, heavy equipment was turning around here. They could have been trying to reach down here and do what I'm probably going to do by hand. It looks like they literally tried to get a backhoe or an excavator with wheels.

[01:15:15]Uh, this could have been the operator's dog, actually. Got be very careful.

[01:15:19]That's a 8ft culvert and there's visible ice. This could easily end very very badly.

[01:15:29]Very cautious coming down here.

[01:15:32]Oh, it looks like they did clear it.

[01:15:35]Not that one though. These are huge, gigantic 10-ft pipes. There's still a beaver dam on that one. We can easily get rid of that. And the water level here won't drop where it affects them.

[01:15:48]Plus, they have wide open water. They could easily extend a their Beaver Lodge entrance down to the water level if they absolutely needed to, but it should be prepared for drought.

[01:16:02]The water's elevated right now because everything's melting.

[01:16:06]We'll make a separate video of that, though.

[01:16:10]Yeah, the excavator literally couldn't get to the one pipe that's blocked because of those trees are in the way. But they were able to reach the middle one. And it looks like the third one off to the left right here may have a slight blockage. Got to be very careful here.

[01:16:29]That's smaller tracks. Whatever that was. Take a quick lunch break before we accomplish this one. This should be actually a really fun, easy one to do.

[01:16:39]Look at the amount of water coming out of these two. That will decrease if we get this other one open.

[01:16:47]How much water is coming out of this other one now?

[01:16:51]You can definitely improve it.

[01:16:55]Not a ton. This is not one that we're going to walk up. I've been through these before during droughts and they're very slippery. Would not want to go through it now. Take a look at the water coming out of it cuz I want to get a good before and after of that, too. But nah, no. No, no. We are We're going to put camera number two in there.

[01:17:19]Definitely.

[01:17:21]I got to take a little break. Then we're going to come back out and do this.

[01:17:25]That'll be a fun one.

[01:17:28]If I can take care of it, I don't have to mark it. And those pipes are so big.

[01:17:32]I don't think the beavers would ever be able to completely block that.

[01:17:39]And if those do get clogged, this backs up and there's more culverts down the road.

[01:17:46]So, with the big high boots, can I walk in the water here? Actually, I think I can just walk in it right here. I don't have to go down the steep part next to the pipe. Cool. Hey everyone, welcome to today's video. Beautiful day.

[01:18:02]All the higher elevation hills are covered in absolutely beautiful freezing rain. We were driving through some higher parts of the roads where all the trees were covered in that. Even hanging up ribbons while marking dangerous frost heaves and deep potholes.

[01:18:20]Bad potholes where a rock gets shoved up through the frost and it recedes making literally a abrupt hole that's like a foot deep.

[01:18:28]Horrible. You can break an axle or a ball joint on those. So, we mark them.

[01:18:32]But it was so cool getting to shake the trees and crack it all off. But right here, I just stopped. I I don't even need to know the pipes if they're blocked or not. I saw a brand new beaver lodge, and beavers can never resist blocking moving water. As soon as I saw that brand new beaver lodge, I just knew there was going to be something up. So, I come over here. I noticed there's lots of tracks. At first I'm like, hey, maybe coyote, maybe lynx, potentially a wolf. We're near Quebec and they have them. Maine just doesn't have a breeding population of them. But then I was like, ah, it's the operator's dog. It's got to be because you see these a back hoe or a excavator with wheels came in here and they reached down here.

[01:19:24]You can even see where the boom scraped.

[01:19:27]It must have been quite the machine to reach down here. If it even reached down here. I'm not sure how this was, but this is very icy. We got to be careful as we come over here to look.

[01:19:37]These are gigantic 8ft diameter covers.

[01:19:42]Let's take a look inside.

[01:19:45]I have walked through these before during droughts. I have multiple videos on them. Usually, you'll get like one big log stuck. We'll straighten it out in the water, send it through like a rocket ship. Woo! had so much fun.

[01:19:58]Awesome.

[01:20:00]We got plenty of videos like that. But no, today this one is actually completely blocked. That should be fairly easy and fun to remove. Good preventative maintenance. And that won't lower the level of the pond.

[01:20:15]It's just going to open that up for more flood waters.

[01:20:19]Will barely be noticeable. There's no ice on the pond, meaning if their lodge entrance, for whatever reason, doesn't reach it, they can build it back. You're not affecting them now that the ice is gone. And the ice is not expected to return now that it's April.

[01:20:37]Definitely still going to get some deep freezes, but the chance of it staying below freezing for an extended amount, no. It's very difficult for it to even be below freezing during the day. now.

[01:20:48]But I also came over here. Those are my tracks. Those something small, maybe raccoon. I don't know what that is. But those are either the operator's dog.

[01:20:57]They let run around. Since these roads, this time of year, the log trucks are only running from 2:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. They flash freeze at night. So, they're gigantic, double wide, overstacked, huge 2,000 200,000 lb log trucks. don't sink in the mud. They don't run them during the day. They destroy the road.

[01:21:20]They're so heavy. Only at night. They're about to suspend that soon once mud season gets really bad where it starts staying above freezing at night. But check out this water. Got to be careful.

[01:21:31]It's slippery. We'll do a before and after cuz that water is going to slow down a little bit once we open the blocked one.

[01:21:41]This one I don't think is blocked, but we'll check it out. It's possible. It looks like there might be a little debris on number three, but this is a huge riverbed. It makes you wonder sometimes, why didn't they just add a bridge, but here's number three. This is the one we're going to open up. And I haven't decided yet. Am I going to walk down here and put camera number two down here looking at it? Because there's lots of broken trees. I don't think we're really going to get a good angle of that.

[01:22:10]I think I'm going to put camera number two on the ceiling looking down it while camera number one is looking at me working. I think that's how we're going to arrange this. Now, why did they unclog that when they had the excavator?

[01:22:23]It's because those very thick cedar trees are in the way. They could have easily smashed them out of the way, but they probably might recognize that that's actually great for erosion between the culverts not occurring.

[01:22:39]We already got the big high boots on and they're already flooded from another job we did earlier. Earlier we had to bring the fireman's axe in there to a different pipe because there was a frozen shell over one of the beaver lodges. I mean one over one of the beaver dams.

[01:22:56]We had to break through the frozen shell before we could lower the dam. We only lowered it by half to minimize horrible flooding in the weeks to come while not affecting the beaver.

[01:23:10]But we put flags up. Hopefully the trapper will get them. And the trappers, I think, are already out and active today. For the first time in my life, I saw ribbons hanging at some of the frost heaves that were marked department of natural resources. And they're great to work with the natural resources. I've reported many situations and they're very quick at relocating them. Such as the Connecticut beaver swamp, if you remember that, we had great uncloggings, but very cruel.

[01:23:39]The state would not relocate them. I felt so bad for those beavers, their pond continuously getting drained. But thankfully, they were properly relocated where they can do beneficial work out west. Most beavers get relocated out west and they only have a 40% survival rate. You might think that's horrible.

[01:24:00]It's better than 100% of them getting shot by the land owners and logging companies. So that's a win-win, but that percentage actually jumps to 60% survival if they trap and re relocate the whole family of them. the young beavers, the two adult beavers, if they're all relocated together, their survival rate is very high because they're not going to be depressed or anything. Much higher survival rate if the trapper can get the whole family at once. All righty. I think the best way to do this is use a magnetic tripod for camera 2. And camera one, I'm bringing the fullsize tripod down to set up in the water looking at it. I like to get different angles on different pipes to switch it up and stay interesting. We got the rake out. I don't see any reason to use a fireman's axe here. This water's moving.

[01:24:51]Okay, we're not going to go down the steep icy embankment and risk getting hurt or falling off the cover like I just showed you. It's pretty steep there. But we'll do a before and after of the pipe that's fully open to see if it decreases.

[01:25:08]We'll get some good before and afters of this side. I don't expect really any water loss or the water depth to go down in this pond. I only expect us to get the blocked one blasting. So, my big high boots are deep enough here.

[01:25:25]I won't ever get taller fishing waiters because if you're in current that's stronger or deeper than this, you really shouldn't be there. You can easily get swept away if we were in moving water, say up to my chest. It's dangerous. So, that's how I know my limits. And I don't mind flooding these. I really don't.

[01:25:44]Doesn't matter to me. I flood them all the time. I got extra clothes. I'll put them back on wet.

[01:25:50]Okay. Very fresh. These beavers are already active. Oh, there is some ice in there. Hopefully, I don't regret that decision. Might have to go back for the axe. You know, it gets so cold up here that this water was definitely freezing, frozen over, safe to walk on, go ice fishing. But it melted. It's moving. It's been warmer.

[01:26:11]But there's still ice on the corners, edges where it's not moving. So that tells you, yeah, this water's still very cold.

[01:26:20]Very, very cold to be touching.

[01:26:24]Okay. The rocks here are slimy and slippery.

[01:26:30]seeing. Okay, Cam. Uh, Culvert 3 might be slightly blocked, but it doesn't look like a big deal.

[01:26:39]All right, let's put the tripod in the water now.

[01:26:45]Straighten its legs out because this is not even. Make sure it's nice. Actually, I'm going to overlap it over this tree branch to kind of hold it in case we do create big current. But I think we're pretty safe. So, this will be kind of cool to unclog. And I'm going to put camera number two in there. And I'll do the alignment signal in just a moment.

[01:27:07]Actually, I'll do it right here while I'm close by.

[01:27:11]Then I don't have to yell.

[01:27:14]Wow, there's water on the screen. These touchcreens are touchy. I I got to maybe put them into shut the touchcreen off.

[01:27:23]All righty. Camera number two is going.

[01:27:28]All righty. We'll set that up on the ceiling in there as we work. Let's see.

[01:27:33]These are very slippery pipes, so I'm going to maybe not work in there. Let's see how this goes, though. Maybe we'll need the fire axe.

[01:28:28]Okay, this whole dam is moving. I think I can get this to wash out all at once.

[01:28:33]I just got to prepare the sides of it.

[01:32:33]Oh, it's budging.

[01:32:35]Come on.

[01:32:40]Come on.

[01:32:42]Almost.

[01:33:22]Okay, it's budging. That dam is not attached to anything. It's just forced there by the water pressure.

[01:33:35]Try a little from this side now.

[01:33:40]Oh wow.

[01:33:43]Oh my gosh. There we go.

[01:33:50]All at once. Oh my gosh.

[01:33:56]Wow.

[01:33:59]Now that current is too strong. You cannot walk by that. That is very strong. Look at that. The angle of that water.

[01:34:09]Wow.

[01:34:16]Hear those rocks? Those were used for the Beaver Dam Foundation.

[01:34:30]All right. Good enough. We'll take a walk down to the other side until those beavers are relocated.

[01:34:37]They're going to keep redaming this. The reason the dam wasn't very solid is because how do they block that much water? They have to take sticks, you know, just put it in front of it, let it go down and jam in front of it. That's why it washed out like that. We just had to compromise the edges and the elevated flood water today really helped.

[01:35:03]I don't think there's a problem at Culver 3, but I got to go check it out.

[01:35:08]Camera number two off.

[01:35:15]That was just awesome.

[01:35:18]That washed out better than I thought.

[01:35:21]So clean.

[01:35:23]It only took eight minutes or less of preparation of compromising the sides of that.

[01:35:35]All righty. I just put everything away.

[01:35:38]Let's go back down there empty-handed. I walked up there and that was a mistake.

[01:35:44]no traction.

[01:35:48]So, there will be minimal water loss. So, it's not even worth checking back in to see if this water level drops. It won't be much if anything.

[01:36:02]These are very slippery, slimy rocks here.

[01:36:08]The slime is already growing. I'm getting it all in all my maple syrup buckets back at home.

[01:36:16]So, let's check it out now.

[01:36:21]Here's what the dam looked like before.

[01:36:27]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:36:30]Completely open and operating.

[01:36:34]Beautiful.

[01:36:36]Here's what the top of the Beaver Dam looked like before.

[01:36:43]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:36:44]Beautiful. That might not look like a lot, but that's 2 feet of very, very fast rushing water.

[01:36:53]Here's what the inside of the pipe looked like before.

[01:36:59]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:37:02]Beautifully open. Wow.

[01:37:06]This cover's so big. It's you could literally take an inner tube through there. Wouldn't recommend that.

[01:37:14]It's got quite the plunge pool at the end. And there can always be unexpected sharp areas inside of a culvert.

[01:37:23]What do I got here? Is that a fishing bobber?

[01:37:30]Fishing bobber right there.

[01:37:34]Is it attached to anything? Nope. just floating.

[01:37:38]I'll keep I'll keep that or I'll leave it somewhere so someone who actually goes fishing can pick it up. Although, I've been wanting to get back into fishing. I haven't done that since I was little. That'd be something new to add to my camping videos, especially if we ever do another camping video in the Everglades when we were down there over the winter.

[01:38:04]or no, that was in the fall, November.

[01:38:06]Up here feels like winter in November.

[01:38:09]Even in October sometimes, but there was fish down there jumping all around me. One literally even jumped into the kayak and I had to pick it up and throw it back out. Those fish, when I looked them up, whatever they were called, have no limit on how many you can catch because they're just so abundant.

[01:38:30]You do need the license for it, but that's only, I think, 25 bucks. Or you could get a national one that cost a little more.

[01:38:40]So, that went well. I want to go take a look at Culvert 3 and confirm it has nothing on it.

[01:38:51]Lots of animal tracks. What is that?

[01:38:54]What are those animal tracks? That could very well be beaver actually cuz they hold their tail up without dragging it.

[01:39:02]It might be beaver actually when I'm seeing the smaller ones. If not raccoons.

[01:39:10]Okay, this is slippery. Got to watch it.

[01:39:13]So those tracks go over there. And look, that's actually a whole another beaver lodge. A smaller one. So that could be that could be the beavers out and about.

[01:39:24]Looks like beaver tracks. At first, I thought it maybe was raccoons.

[01:39:32]Looks like the fisherman forgot his beer can, too.

[01:39:36]Ah, that. Yeah, I'll pick that up in a minute. Yep. The beavers. Look, they've been cutting down trees already this year.

[01:39:43]Just got a fresh layer of snow on top of it. So, this is our typical unclogging at this location. It's usually just a big piece of driftwood. I get in, I straighten out, and that's not good. You see this cover got lifted up, kind of crinkled. That was not an excavator.

[01:40:00]That's This water's higher than normal.

[01:40:03]When the surface froze, it was under there. Then it flooded. The whole layer of ice lifted and that's how it got crumpled in that situation. Ooh, we are actually dropping slightly. That ice just gave. Nice.

[01:40:20]Nice.

[01:40:21]Nothing too noticeable. I don't think it'll drop very much at all because you saw it already had these coverts working. I want to get this. I want to get this.

[01:40:32]I don't think it's that deep.

[01:40:36]Shouldn't have trusted that.

[01:40:41]So, water like this is very cold. Once I start touching it, fingers feel numb.

[01:40:46]Give it five or 10 minutes of working.

[01:40:48]Blood pumping. It's pumping to my hands.

[01:40:51]so fast. I could literally stay in this for hours working at this extent now.

[01:40:57]So, driftwood. This is the typical nemesis at this location.

[01:41:03]I've never seen actual beaver stuff here before at this spot. Some of this stuff actually looks really cool. Look at that. That would be good for someone's garden if you didn't have to lug it this far out of the wilderness.

[01:41:19]Trying to break off a few pieces so it'll be lighter to pick up. Okay, there we go.

[01:41:28]Those are just swamp swamp trees. There we go. Nice.

[01:41:36]More preventative maintenance. One less thing the beavers can build against.

[01:41:41]Makes it a little harder for them to clog them back up by removing all this.

[01:41:47]See, they began putting stuff against that. Got some more.

[01:41:53]If this wasn't crumpled and it was down to the riverbed, this would have so much current like the other one. I wouldn't be able to stand here like this.

[01:42:02]Not safely. Anyways, I've walked through those and they're so slippery. I've been in these during a drought.

[01:42:15]Believe it or not, even as a little kid, I know these areas so well. I used to ride bikes and stuff down these. I had someone question me in my comments saying, "What kid's going to be out there in the middle of nowhere? Why are you flagging a big rock that could fall on someone exploring it?" I was that kid. There is thousands of privately owned camps in the wilderness out here.

[01:42:38]And there's also hundreds of state-run campsites.

[01:42:43]Some are free.

[01:42:44]Some of them you pay a little bit. That helps maintain the outhouse or the picnic table, that kind of stuff. This one's not flowing that that amazingly either. I can actually get in front of this one, too, and get rid of more preventative debris.

[01:43:02]Oh, I like the way they have this set up right now. So, that one looks definitely crinkled. The end looks upwards, but maybe it was installed slightly like that, too. Cuz what I'm seeing now is the one we just unclogged might be primary flow. Primary flow 2, secondary flow, or you could call this secondary.

[01:43:24]And that one's just another secondary.

[01:43:27]Let me explain what that means.

[01:43:30]It is better for the health of a culvert pipe during a drought to have one of them flowing moderately instead of all of them just trickling. How is that better?

[01:43:44]During a drought, if this water is very low, these won't be flowing at all. This one will have moderate current. Why wouldn't you want just a little trickle going through all of them?

[01:43:56]Couple reasons. Reason one, the one that's flowing moderately is harder to clog. If they're all slowly trickling, it's easier for beavers to block, easier for natural debris to block. Also, when it's trickling ever so slightly, iron bacteria will start growing in that trickle. Look up iron oxidizing bacteria. It only grows in slow or stagnant water. Can't grow in this. It will literally eat the iron pipe.

[01:44:27]Look at that slime. Definitely don't want to be standing on that. If I tried to get in this. Yeah, you're going for a ride.

[01:44:36]Can't even step onto the end of that.

[01:44:40]Let's get out of here before I slip.

[01:44:43]That could be excavator damage. But I think this whole thing is broken by frost to be honest with you. I think that's frost damage.

[01:44:52]This was ice got under it and lifted it up. That's what I think. The beavers aren't even coming out.

[01:45:00]Sometimes you'll have a territorial one get kind of close and smack its tail to try to scare you away.

[01:45:07]But it's such a big pond. Bigger areas like this, they usually don't get territorial unless you're like right up on the lodge. But then again, there is literally another lodge right there that's brand new. I know this area well.

[01:45:22]Neither of these lodges were here back in the last summer. They were built in the fall at some point.

[01:45:31]Okay, now we got this on camera that we just picked that up just in case someone ever pulls us over and sees beer cans that we've been collecting in the wilderness and tries to accuse you of drinking. I've had police officers try to pull stuff like that before, literally. I pulled over once on the highway to take a phone call so I wasn't distracted driving. Pulled over into the breakdown lane. Police officer pulls up behind me. His partner comes up on the passenger side. He's on my driver's side.

[01:46:12]And he first ask me, he doesn't even say, "How's it going?" or "Why you stopped? You need anything?" He starts off by saying, "When was the last time you smoked marijuana, sir?" And I was really confused by that. And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he points to my glass pipe in my console in the middle there. He was just fishing for a reason to search my vehicle. You know what the glass thing was? Tiny little glass jar that's about 3 4 in tall and it is a numbing jelly for a toothache. He tried to say that with a pipe.

[01:46:49]Don't ever let them search your car.

[01:46:51]They'll try to make it into something it's not. I got distracted. I was about to take off without doing downstream before and afters.

[01:47:00]But if you're doing a good deed picking up trash, I know lots of people do that.

[01:47:06]Make sure you film yourself where the beer bottles and stuff came from. Even though they're noticeably dirty and filthy, some detectives don't have the best detective skills.

[01:47:20]All right, let's see what we got down here.

[01:47:22]Yeah, that's definitely going a lot harder.

[01:47:27]The tree is really in the way, but here's what it looked like before.

[01:47:35]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:47:37]Pretty good improvement.

[01:47:39]What about down here? Did the one that was flowing heavily earlier decrease?

[01:47:45]I'm sure it did because we just moved a lot of that water over. All right. Be very careful not to fall here. Here's what it looked like before.

[01:47:58]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:48:03]Here's what it looked like before.

[01:48:07]And here's what it looks like now.

[01:48:10]If we step back up here. Yeah, those are beaver tracks. It looks like the beaver went over there. Hey, I don't want to go down the slippery slope and they went back because all I see is the bigger tracks of some other animal.

[01:48:26]All right, there's the blockage that we released pieces of it. Anyways, we're in the middle of the wilderness. There is not another bridge or anything for miles. The chance of that getting down there and causing any sort of problem is close to nothing. People mention that all the time. This is not a city. That debris blockage is not going to just arrive at the next pipe. There's literally not another pipe. This enters a much larger river up there. Just bridges.

[01:48:54]And if it does happen to get down to one of the hydroelectric dams, which it won't, that stuff's water logged. It'll sink as soon as it gets to the beginning of the reservoir on its natural path. But if it did, they have those machines that go back and forth across it, collecting all the debris and tree trunks. Pretty cool machines, actually. I just drove by one earlier today. It's like a stationary excavator on tracks that drives across the top of the dam and it can reach down and grab all the junk.

[01:49:26]Seems like a fun job.

[01:49:34]Look at all those logs. All those logs got to go out to the sawmills before these roads turn to a muddy mess.

[01:49:43]So, there's lots of giant trucks coming in and out of here all night once this stuff flash freezes.

[01:49:52]So, I'm going to try to get up really early in the morning to try to get some footage of all the huge oversized trucks.

[01:50:03]You won't see them during the day this time of year. They sink into these roads and cause so much damage. Look at these frost heaves.

[01:50:14]Well, they're doing a good thinning job here. Take a look at this.

[01:50:18]And you see that back there? They're leaving small rows, maybe even thinning a little too much.

[01:50:25]In my experience, that might actually have a die out during the next summer.

[01:50:30]If this summer is wet, no problem. But that could shock those trees that aren't used to that.

[01:50:39]Very much possible.

[01:50:42]Once the sun gets in there and starts drying the ground out, they're not used to that.

[01:50:47]Sometimes thinning is good, sometimes it's not.

[01:50:57]Yeah, this part of the road is starting to get bad. This is always the most soupy part of the road. You would think that they'd eventually start raising this up, but they they haven't. The ditches need to be dug deeper, too, to get some of that water out of there.

[01:51:13]This specific area becomes a huge mud hole first.

[01:51:18]A lot of the roads stayed dry well after this one really goes downhill.

[01:51:25]Once they get a few trucks stuck and they have to push out with bulldozers and stuff is when they will close these ones out.

[01:51:34]This is always one of the worst sections.

[01:51:39]Last year I had to really speed through it so I wouldn't get stuck. We're not at that bad quite yet.

[01:51:47]But that's why you always see giant stockpiles of logs at sawmills because there's a long period of time they cannot get stuff out. So they need to stockpile it so the sawmill can keep running. Like people always talk about how wasteful it is. They see giant stacks of logs with sprinklers running on the top of them. You got to keep that wood wet. If that wood dries out, it's wear and tear on the saws and the pulp processing facilities.

[01:52:17]That's why you see those things running all the time, spraying the logs down. If you ever driven by a sawmill, pretty soon there's going to be a gap about a month where they can't get literally anything out of the wilderness. But they'll keep on logging.

[01:52:35]They'll just stack it up by the roads until the trucks can get going again.

[01:52:42]We'll have fun tonight. It's already down below freezing and we still have four more hours before the sun goes down. That was an easy quick unclogging.

[01:52:49]We'll post that one tomorrow as a separate video cuz there's some people that love these type of videos driving flagging hazards, but then there's some people that don't. So, we switch it up.

[01:53:10]We got another bridge.

[01:53:19]All righty. Just investigating why there's no ribbons here.

[01:53:26]It's not a hazard to the road at the moment, and I don't think it will be. I think if that needs to run, it'll be able to jump the embankment down to the next culvert as designed.

[01:53:36]There's a blocked culvert here.

[01:53:40]It really should have blue ribbon to notify road crews. Or it could actually resolve itself. So maybe I'll skip putting one here since this should never actually get into the road. You can see they just were digging this out last year. Yeah, there's a blocked culvert right there. I don't think it needs to be marked. I don't see that as any hazard to the road. But it comes out over here. Probably just frozen.

[01:54:07]We'll find out in a couple weeks. If it's collapsed, I have no idea if it's plastic or not.

[01:54:14]If it's plastic, the ground here is very wet. The frost line probably expanded into it.

[01:54:22]Garbage plastic covers rarely make it through the first winter unless they're installed in very dry ground.

[01:54:29]Dry ground is not something you come across out here very often. We got to be super careful now on this section of road. I'm in four-wheel drive and it is so slippery. Watch this.

[01:54:44]Wheels are spinning rapidly.

[01:54:48]I just went around that corner and thankfully was able to handle the unexpected.

[01:55:00]Very unpredictable roads. It keeps going from ice to mud.

[01:55:08]So you got it. Oh, what's that? Oh, red fox.

[01:55:17]I don't think we'll be able to see him.

[01:55:18]I'm sure he ran fast, but maybe.

[01:55:25]He's long gone.

[01:55:50]Wow, look at this. We're on top of a bridge. That's absolutely beautiful.

[01:55:54]Look at that.

[01:56:01]It looks so scenic. This be a good place to put a canoe. Could probably go pretty far in this stagnant river. Look at that. We got a garbage plastic cover.

[01:56:13]It got lifted up by frost and then hit by the snow plow.

[01:56:18]Here's another one. Another damaged covert. And it looks like the snowshoe hairs have been living in there.

[01:56:26]Yep, it's plastic.

[01:56:28]This is a very pretty spot.

[01:56:31]They leave the tall trees which are eastern white pine standing because that'll be definitely brought to the lumber mill while the smaller ones that are growing in there are going to be pulp wood. Look how close together they are. I don't think that that was planted. That was just probably seeds that blew there. But interesting to see the two different types of trees together like that. Lots of sharp shale rock. We are still running the winter tires which are soft. We did get shale rock through it earlier in the week, but I was able to jam two tire plugs into the slash and it's it's still holding.

[01:57:07]More beautiful spring thaw scenery.

[01:57:12]That's nice.

[01:57:15]This looks like a good spot to maybe do some tubing in the summer.

[01:57:22]Could easily walk up in there and take it back. I'm the first vehicle down this road. Those are snowmobile tracks.

[01:57:30]It's kind of packed down from the snowmoilers, so we might not continue any further down this unplowed road.

[01:57:36]Maybe eventually. Look how beautiful this is.

[01:57:40]Wow. Really nice.

[01:57:45]There's dams out here in the wilderness if you didn't know that in Maine.

[01:57:50]flood control dams to stop all this water that comes out of the wilderness during the spring thaw from interrupting the cities so they can hold it back.

[01:58:00]That's really cool down there. Look at that really thick ice around the corner.

[01:58:06]Love to see that.

[01:58:12]Yeah, I think we're going to spin it around and we'll continue down this road in a couple weeks if it if it thaws out.

[01:58:20]Every year's different. Sometimes you got to wait until May before some of these are usable and not dangerous.

[01:58:28]Sometimes they're worse in May because it could become a mud hole instead of an ice rink. You never know.

[01:58:35]I really hope I don't have to use my winch today. If I do want to use my winch, because we're driving down these wet roads, splashing through puddles like this in below freezing temperatures, the entire front of the vehicle is inches of ice that would have to be chiseled away in order to even use it.

[01:58:59]I don't think we'll get stuck today.

[01:59:01]Everything's still very frozen.

[01:59:03]If anything, it'll be us getting back on the road after sliding off because this is slippery. That's why I'm turning around. It's not deep. It's just slippery.

[01:59:17]This part of the road is plowed, but it's a muddy mess. And you see to the left, a log fell off one of the trucks.

[01:59:22]That's a nice cedar log.

[01:59:26]Very mucky here. Very, very bumpy.

[01:59:32]Oh yeah, there's this is a place that's definitely going to be getting people stuck once this starts melting out a little more.

[01:59:45]This is incredibly bumpy.

[01:59:53]What we got here? We always take note of sitting water.

[01:59:58]Why is that sitting water there? We got to check on culbritz. It's flowing. It's possible it has a blockage. We're going to find out. Look, I'm the only one that has driven here since the snow fell.

[02:00:10]There's no other tracks. So, no one else has been here in days.

[02:00:16]Yeah. Let's see what we got here. I see water flowing out of it. So, it's not frozen. It's a plastic pipe. Once you get a little bit of water going through an ice dam, it'll rapidly melt out.

[02:00:30]It's when it's solid and you have problems. All right. Nothing's wrong with it. It's just low. There's a rise in the pipe. That's what it is. The pipe is not installed straight or the frost heaving messed it up. All right. This section of road is going to be reopened soon.

[02:00:52]It's currently only open like that because of snowmoilers. Any unplowed road up here is open to snowmmoilers if you didn't know that.

[02:01:01]That'll be reopened and they're going to do more logging down there. Snowmobilers are the only reason it's not overgrown.

[02:01:09]And that's why they like snowmmoilers.

[02:01:11]They like off-road enthusiasts that use these abandoned roads. It keeps everything open. Oh, I just hit a really bad one. This road has been good for a while. A lot of potholes, but frost heaves, no, not really. I just hit such a bad one. And it's not a straight one.

[02:01:29]So, it rocks you back and forth as you go over. I really got to mark that one.

[02:01:33]That's horrible. Look how far it splashed.

[02:01:38]Yeah, I'm not going to mark them anymore on this road. They're just one after another.

[02:01:44]Some of them are horrible, some aren't.

[02:01:48]It's just so many of them one after another. So, I'm not going to get out and mark them for a while. Unless there's a long stretch without one, then it comes on suddenly. Those are the dangerous ones.

[02:02:03]All right. In this area, there is a huge hole, but that hole is only in the snow pack that's accumulated over the winter from heavy trucks.

[02:02:16]That water crossing has literally just eroded down to the road.

[02:02:21]It's not actually damaged yet. The water's crossing there because the cover pipe that's supposed to be handling that is frozen. It is much colder in this area here. We're still up on top of pretty deep snow pack.

[02:02:39]This is pretty. The sun is starting to come out and this area has some freezing rain on those trees. Sky looks dark up there. It's supposed to snow more.

[02:02:49]This is a very, very cold area of Maine.

[02:02:54]We're probably 40 miles from the Quebec border.

[02:03:01]Very cold up here. High elevation.

[02:03:06]This area's got deep snow pack. It's been around for a while. You can tell this area did not thaw out like most of the state did.

[02:03:16]Like earlier where we were, everything melted. It reoccurred, melted again a few days ago and reoccurred literally overnight and all that water when I drive through puddles spraying up over the whole front end. I keep turning the wipers off, but it's getting into the spring mechanism that tensions your wiper blade and it's causing it to not work. So, it's not clearing at all on the passenger side.

[02:03:44]It starts up on this side. that I'm going to have to get out and defrost that. I have antifreeze in a spray bottle.

[02:03:53]I'm really happy to see this. They must have done this in the fall right before winter cuz I was out here in September and this wasn't here. Brand new bridge.

[02:04:02]I made a stink about this for a while.

[02:04:06]There was a large culvert here instead and the bottom was rusted out and it kept causing erosion and there kept becoming sink holes on the top of it which is super dangerous. Anyone driving over that could fall into a little sinkhole because it was washing out from beneath. But I'm glad to see there's an actual bridge now. It's interesting.

[02:04:30]Most logging bridges will have a wooden deck. This is a concrete deck.

[02:04:38]Not exactly sure if that's a good or bad idea because wooden decks get destroyed very easily by tracks and the huge tire chains they have on their log skids and stuff cuz they'll often drive that down the road and it basically creates a rumble strip in the dirt until it gets rained off or people drive over it a ton. How do you think that'll react to concrete?

[02:05:05]probably more durable, but I feel like it's going to damage it. At least there's no rebar. I mean, there's no road salt to hurt the rebar. You know, Northern Maine has maple syrup production. You see, that's what this is right here.

[02:05:20]Unbelievably, their season is just starting and it's April.

[02:05:27]These areas will be making syrup all the way through the month of May, long after my area. My area is probably coming to an end soon. My area is not even getting below freezing most of the nights now.

[02:05:39]And you need that fluctuation. Up here is much colder. You would think there'd be a lot more production up here than Vermont because the season is so much longer, but the truth is it's not very mountainous. That's the good thing about Vermont and why they produce so much syrup. Very mountainous around here.

[02:05:59]They have to have generator buildings and pumping stations everywhere. There's no power grid. They have to make their own. And the land is kind of flat, so it requires more energy to make it because they have to have these pumping stations. There's actually a surprising amount of maple syrup production in the main Northwoods.

[02:06:20]There's got to be hundreds of thousands of acres of it.

[02:06:28]This is just a really small operation compared to some of it. I hope you'll get to see it. There's a moose in there.

[02:06:34]Oh my gosh, there it is.

[02:06:37]Not a great shot, but you can see there's a moose in there. It was just in the road and it ran.

[02:06:44]All right, we got one of the biggest bridges in the main Northwoods coming up.

[02:06:50]There's one that's actually twice as big. Amazingly, it's not even plowed or even being used this winter.

[02:06:59]There's nothing up here. We're about to turn around. This is this about to go into Quebec. There's an unmanned border crossing up here. It's just got a bunch of cameras and sensors that pick up the log trucks because in these areas, it's not financially feasible sending the logs to the main sawmills because we're literally right next to the border. It all goes to be processed in Quebec. A lot of this area is actually leased forestry land for Quebec logging companies, even though it's Maine.

[02:07:31]But that's how it works at the border.

[02:07:34]Canada doesn't seem to have them unless they're well hidden. But coming into the United States, there's always these big sensors you have to drive through and it detects if there's any illegal riders like hiding inside the middle of the log truck or whatever because you there's unbelievable ways people smuggle themselves in.

[02:07:55]But there's sensors coming into the United States everywhere. I don't see those sensors going into Canada the other way though.

[02:08:04]Never seen them. But if I was to drive through an unmanned border crossing, it would create a response immediately because I don't have the sensor thing in the windshield like the log trucks have.

[02:08:17]So, the log trucks won't be running for a bit longer. But look at that. That's sheer ice.

[02:08:23]They'll be out soon. They might even start earlier in these areas. But there's no other tracks because they're not running yet. The snow is super fresh. It was snowing in the beginning of this video and I can't believe the It feels so different up here. And look, we got the underwear trees, the men's underwear trees, the women's underwear trees.

[02:08:50]They keep on adding to it every time we come up here.

[02:08:55]So this morning down in the bottom of what I consider northern Maine, there's no snow at all. It was quite a bit above freezing up here. I don't think this area even got above freezing today at all. Feels like winter up here.

[02:09:19]Wow. The river is still frozen.

[02:09:22]Can't believe it.

[02:09:24]And it's okay to walk out on this bridge. You can hear it's so quiet out here in the wilderness, especially with this slush. You're going to hear a vehicle long before it even shows up.

[02:09:34]These are these are kind of built like a railroad trussle. Pretty much exactly like a railroad trussle, except the rail and tie plate would be connected directly to those beams. It's built just like a railroad bridge. Super strong and simple. It's got the little guard there to hopefully stop you from sliding off it. I wouldn't trust that though. This is exactly where we went camping a couple years ago. Our tent was set up right around there in the coldest part of the winter. And that was cool.

[02:10:05]One of the log trucks stopped here, shut their engine off, and talked to me.

[02:10:12]That water's deep. I can't see the bottom or anything. Slow moving. That's what I always thought would be a good river in the summertime to go tubing down.

[02:10:21]Always thought that.

[02:10:24]This side's still completely frozen.

[02:10:26]I've even considered camping on one of those islands like in the summer.

[02:10:34]It's so quiet.

[02:10:36]Unbelievably quiet. I love it. One of my friends up in Alaska said that somehow it's literally colder here right now. up there. They're actually above freezing and they're already got their daytime.

[02:10:52]The sun doesn't go down until 9:30 at night. This area 6:00, 9:30 at night's later than our summer here, but they also get full daylight come another two months for a bit.

[02:11:07]But up there, he said after six months of negative -30, just it hitting the freezing mark feels like an oven.

[02:11:17]But yeah, that's totally understandable.

[02:11:19]Same here. If it's been cold for a while, soon as the sun starts coming out a little bit above freezing, it's beautiful. You see that one spot that didn't freeze? There's a rock creating an upwards current and that's what melts out random spots like that first. Yeah, I'm cold. I I have a moderate winter jacket and it's it is very cold up here.

[02:11:44]I've got layers if I need them. I'm going to take the big high boots off, put on some dry pants. I still got wet pants cuz I'm not going to be doing anymore and cloggings. It's about to get dark. If I do find anything, I'll return to it in the morning. But up in these areas, it's so extremely cold. We can't really do anything probably until the end of April up in these areas.

[02:12:06]This is the coldest climate zone Maine has. June 15th is growing season up here. Very cold.

[02:12:16]Remember years ago I set up a time lapse camera on one of those trees and I got a time lapse of this river thawing, flooding.

[02:12:26]That was cool.

[02:12:31]There's no wind or anything and I'm very much shivering. But before it gets dark, I have to chisel off the headlights, the off-road light. They have inches of ice secreted on them.

[02:12:43]And I'm still going to do road inspections probably until I get tired.

[02:12:48]I can still hang up ribbons and mark frost heaves. I just got here. This is where I'm about to turn around cuz Quebec's right up there.

[02:12:57]The reason I like to drive these roads and then flag them on the way back is because if there's a dozen giant frost heaves in a row, you don't have to mark them all. I know that now. So on the way back, I'll be able to put a whole bunch of ribbons before it comes up. And then I'll put a bunch after it for the other direction. Then you're not getting out and flagging one after another, all in sight of each other. It's kind of annoying, but it'll be easy.

[02:13:26]Oh, it is cold out here. I think I'm also just tired. It's been a big day.

[02:13:30]I've been on the road since probably 7 in the morning. Been driving a lot. We drove about 150 miles on just these horrible roads alone.

[02:13:46]And the ice building up on my running boards.

[02:13:50]Can't even open the back doors. There's so much ice built up.

[02:13:54]The wipers aren't working properly because the tensioning mechanism is all frozen. I got to try to free that up also before it gets dark.

[02:14:03]And then I think I'm going to try to just do a continuous vlog type video.

[02:14:07]The whole drive back. Takes about two hours to get back through this road while I get out and flag things. And it's the evening. There could be moose out. Moose, they like cold weather, but they're also hunkering down. They're more active when it starts staying above freezing. You'll see a ton of moose out on these roads. If anyone likes to go moose watching, nature watching. Best time to see moose out here is warm April days because this month is it can be warm or it can be cold. Definitely May.

[02:14:38]May is probably the best month to see moose. I can sometimes see dozens of them every night out in these areas.

[02:14:45]They're very active when it starts getting warm. June's a good month, too.

[02:14:49]When it gets hot out in July, August, they all seem to retreat up into Quebec where it's colder and then they usually trickle back down throughout the next winter. That's what I've noticed.

[02:15:01]Anyways, I love these bridges. I got to get a few pictures. But I hope today's video was interesting, everyone.

[02:15:08]Thanks for watching and have a great day.

[02:15:13]Hey, there's a moose right there.

[02:15:16]There's a moose.

[02:15:20]Yeah, I'm pretty wet.

[02:15:24]Socks are soaked. All right, I got my nice insulated thermal pants.

[02:15:29]They have a radiant barrier in it that reflects your own body heat back at you. Now, I got my dry steel toe rubber boots. If you saw a recent video I made, I put one of these types of boot in a deep freezer or my laboratory freezer. It shattered like nitrogen. These are not good for the Arctic, but it's fine in weather like this.

[02:15:55]But I I got a few more extra pairs of pants. I always expect to get soaked going in covert pipes. I love doing this kind of stuff. Now I feel warmer. But when I'm actually clearing culverts, it's cold. It's bad at first, but then it turns into a wet suit once your body warms up that moisture. Now I need to go ahead and scrape my headlights. The ice secretion is insane from when it's below freezing and you're driving through wet roads.

[02:16:27]That's bad. Creates so much ice.

[02:16:31]I don't even think I could get my hood open. It's all inside. The gas gets frozen. All right, we're getting into nighttime mode now. So, it'll be dark soon.

[02:16:43]I just cleaned off all the lights.

[02:16:49]I want to look on the beautiful river one more time. It wasn't hard to get it off, actually.

[02:16:57]I thought it was. It's just not that cold, I guess. So, it was more of a slush than an ice.

[02:17:04]It could have been bad. Frozen mud is like concrete when you're trying to get that off. really holds itself together.

[02:17:12]And I don't want to use a metal chisel because that could break the glass lens on the off-road lights.

[02:17:23]Well, we have a fun drive ahead of ourselves.

[02:17:34]I think I'm going to brush my teeth, too, before we start heading on back.

[02:17:39]It's so nice and peaceful out here. So, I think I'm going to uh walk back out on the bridge while I do that.

[02:17:54]Shut it back off cuz I'll be here for a little bit.

[02:18:03]So, while I'm standing up here, I'm noticing something. I want to zoom in on these tracks.

[02:18:09]Can anyone identify those tracks?

[02:18:12]River otter here. Here's why I think it's a river otter. There's at least one of them.

[02:18:20]Maybe it looks like maybe two separate tracks.

[02:18:23]Yeah, that's definitely two separate tracks cuz they're all aimed in the same direction. It's not one that came down and walked back. It's two going in one direction. But the reason I think it's a river otter, I'll show you.

[02:18:37]Those tracks are brand new.

[02:18:40]It was cold today. This river did not flood and cover up those tracks. It literally just disappears. Whatever it is swam underneath there.

[02:18:50]So, I think it's a river otter. Two river otterters. The tracks there. I also found this.

[02:18:56]It's like a perfect piece of firewood.

[02:18:57]It fell off one of the log trucks.

[02:19:00]I'm curious. Is that going to get sucked under or get stuck against the end right there?

[02:19:05]There's a good amount of current. Let's see. Is that going to get stuck or is it going to get sucked under? It might have too much buoyancy to get sucked under.

[02:19:16]We're going to see. We're going to see in like 10 seconds.

[02:19:23]Here it goes.

[02:19:29]Bump.

[02:19:31]It's going under. Nope. Good. Oh. Oh, it's stuck, I think. Is it going to get hit?

[02:19:43]Is that enough to push it under? Nope.

[02:19:46]That's stuck. I thought it was going to get under there. I guess not. One time I had fun, like I always show the reason we mark these frost heaves is because logs fall off the trucks. One time I was driving here and there was a log right in the center part. Not a big deal.

[02:20:03]Every vehicle that travels this has clearance.

[02:20:06]And if you don't, you should have seen that. But there was a log right in the middle here. And I was able to, you know, move it one side at a time. And I shoved it up and over. That made such a nice big splash. That was fun.

[02:20:25]We're sleeping out here right now on the side of the road. Oh my gosh, the windshield is so dirty from my breath in here. Oh, we can't even see it. The huge log trucks are out already.

[02:20:38]Yeah, I can't do anything about the windows fogging up. I think I'm going to step out and film the next one. They're already active and it's midnight.

[02:20:47]It's the middle of the night. We're sleeping on the side of the road and here comes a massive northern main log truck.

[02:20:55]They got to drive slow.

[02:20:59]And maybe I shouldn't be parking here.

[02:21:00]There's a frost heave there. Is it?

[02:21:02]Let's see how he runs over this.

[02:21:07]Ah, not that bad.

[02:21:11]Really loaded.

[02:21:17]There goes an empty one. He's going fast.

[02:21:21]Coming back out. Another one.

[02:21:24]And yet an even another one. Look at that. Another one coming.

[02:21:51]There's so many of the log trucks out tonight. And you know what?

[02:21:57]I just found out there's a winter storm warning. That's awesome. They're supposed to get seven inches of snow tomorrow night and we're gonna be out here for it. It's going to be awesome.

[02:22:07]Gonna be an awesome day. Look at the sky is actually clear at the moment. It's getting cold fast. It's now 3:00 in the morning. I decided I'm just going to watch a bunch of log trucks. I'm waiting for those guys to all come back loaded.

[02:22:19]Should all be back within the next hour or so.

[02:22:24]Then I'm just going to sleep in.

[02:22:28]Here comes one of them back.

[02:22:39]Yep. That that guy is not exactly stacked over height, but he did have the extensions on the trailer out.

[02:22:47]Here comes another one.

[02:22:55]That one was loaded pretty high. And the moon is still so bright and beautiful.