Last year there were no animals, no birds, very few bugs, and one footprint of a Grizzly bear. This year there was lush green vegetation, lots of bugs, birds, chipmunks and squirrels, but no bear tracks. We happened upon these four moose nearly on our trail. We stepped back off the trail, behind some trees while the moose decided what to do with us. They walked calmly away and we breathed a sigh of relief.
On the left is a photo from last year and on the right is a nearly identical photo from this year. Our path up and down from the meadow was along the cliffs between the two snowbanks but this year we had to go the long way around. I traced our previous year's path in red across the snow in this current year's photo. Obviously there was a lot more snow this year.
These two photos taken from down in the meadow show what the path up the cliff looked like both last year (on the left) and this year (on the right). Our path from last year, over the bare rock, was completely covered in about 10-20 feet of snow.
When we arrived at the crash scene the fuselage was exactly the way I remember leaving it last year, with the orange baling twine holding the last remaining pieces together.
We unbolted or cut off all of the steel control rods and shafts, wires, hoses, cables and fuel/hydraulic lines, then cut the fuselage in half so the multiple pieces could be carried by no more than two persons each.
When we were finished the only thing left was the engine. All of the big pieces have been carried away and the last of the small pieces were bagged and ready to be carried away as well.
I learned a lesson the hard way: Don't try to find your way up the cliff before Louis is there to show the way. I ended up going up a very steep route, between a snowbank and a cliff. In the left photo above you can see the snowbank above me. Then I was gripping the cliff with fingertips, toes, knees, and elbows. There was no time for taking pictures. At one point I was wedging myself between the cliff and the snowbank, like climbing up a chimney. The middle and right photos above show what it looked like after I reached the top.
With one more angle on that route, you can see both above and below the snowbank. I kept the camera as level as possible so you can see how steep the slope is, and note that it was covered with loose sand and gravel.
Here is a photo of the correct route, taken from above. James is in the center of the photo, wearing his red and black plaid shirt. Obviously he didn't need to crawl on his hands and knees to get up that slope, but it still wasn't easy.
The two left photos show that we both made it safely to the top and the right one shows the cliff we climbed as we walked away from it.
At the top, in the location we call "stage 4" James and I loaded up some scrap to carry out. He took one of those two landing gear wheels that Lief carried up the cliff last year. Louis carried the third landing gear wheel all the way from the meadow, and I just grabbed a bag of misc small parts from the stage 4 location.
On the way out we didn't encounter any more moose or other large animals. We had started from the meadow at about 8:20 AM and we arrived at the car at about 5:00 PM, having taken several long breaks along the way. The distance from the creek crossing to the car was approximately five miles by trail, but three miles in a straight line.
It rained every night, once with thunder and lightning, then it got very cold, but it was clear and hot again each morning. The giant chipmunks in the meadow are extremely shy and they don't attack our food supplies at night. The marmots were seen only at a great distance but we could hear them calling to each other from time to time.
