Final Frisbie Fandango

Local resident Bob Frisbie is retiring this summer and for his going away party Mother Nature dealt him one of the worst winters for the Hiway 21 Department in decades. At one time there was ten feet of snow on Banner Summit and there is near 40 inches of water content as of the 20^th of March 2017. One of the movies shows the eight feet still remaining on the outhouse at Banner Summit.

There is a huge area of steep rocky chutes in the Mile Post (MP) 98 to 100 areas where when conditions are right, provide fuel for a Hiway department nightmare.  It is truly a “dance to the Fandango” to orchestrate various equipment to get the road open again and without getting any workers with serious injuries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the marked photo of the initial slide below, the various equipment elements of the dance are superimposed on the slide photo to show how Bob directed the dance.  The snow cat has the lowest sinking pressure and can climb to the top of the slide the easiest.  Its job is to chase away as many smaller logs and rocks as it can as well as provide a partially packed access road for the D-6 bulldozer shown just below the snow cat.  Bob told me he fell into line for dozer duty because he had the most experience at maneuvering a heavy machine in snow that could give way and leave you with 20 tons of steel stuck atop the slide.  That would require bringing in a larger dozer to get it back down to ground.

Once the dozer segregates large logs and rocks, he pushes them to the track hoe which with a thumb can pick up the pieces and put them in a dump truck or segregate them for a frontend loader to be pushed out of the work area.  Finally the slide is clean enough for the rotary blower which can then throw the snow some 75 feet to the low side of the cut, in this case towards Canyon Creek. The front end loader (not shown) needs the road grader to clean up and bunch the lose stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The slides this year did not contain nearly as much clutter as came down with slides in 2014  when it slid in an area from the south which previously had not slid and there were countless trees embedded in the slide. Some of the remnants of that slide are still lying along the south side of Canyon Creek. This was probably Bob’s most challenging effort in his career so this year I decided to make a documentary of what has to happen to get the Hiway open again. In the slide of 2014 Canyon Creek was blocked and a lake formed behind the slide making it dangerous for a while to even be below the slide with equipment.

 

In order to get an overall picture in your mind of the slides, I made some crude videos that cover most of the slide area of 2017 and also of the Banner Summit area where the outhouse is almost buried out of sight.

Jim Branson, Retired Engineer, Lowman, Id.