Going 'up the mountain'

I've mentioned before (like here) that one of the projects we've been working on is a site at the top of a mountain behind Bella Bella. It is here that we have a relay site complete with a tower, wind turbine, solar panels, transmitter radios, and a big box full of batteries and electrical gear. I thought I might walk through what a trip 'up the mountain' entails, since it's not as simple as it may seem.

First, we load everything we might possibly need, and a bunch of stuff we probably don't need, into a boat.

 

Then we drive the boat over to Bella Bella, 5-10 minutes (depending on the boat and how much stuff we're taking). John drops me off on a breakwater and I scurry up the rocks to where the truck is parked. He takes the boat over to the dock, I drive the truck down and meet him. Then we take all of that stuff we might need and all the stuff we probably don't and unload it from the boat, cart it up the dock (best to do when the tide is high) and load it into the truck.

Then we drive this truck:

 

Up this road:

Which turns into this road:

And park it here:

(where's waldo?)

Then we unload the stuff again and hike it up the last 300 feet through ankle-deep mud and over roots and dump it all here

Then the very next thing we do is start a fire, because the bugs are so bad up here we are unable to get work done.

 

 The smoke helps a bit, but it is still a tough work environment! 

Then we stop and enjoy this view for a few minutes

Before finally getting down to work. This particular trip, we stayed up there for 27 hours because we had to recharge the deep cycle batteries from well beyond discharged. This involved hooking up 2 generators to 3 chargers to 4 batteries for 15 hours.

The chargers, working overtime trying to revive the batteries

We slept in the truck and got up occasionally to check on the system and refuel the generators. Once the batteries were recharged, we did various other tasks, like wiring in a low voltage disconnect (so we don't have to recharge the batteries from 6 volts to 24 volts again), and replacing one of the wind generator blades (it was broken, which was why the batteries drained in the first place)

Then we load everything back into the truck, drive back down the road, unload everything from the truck, carry it down the dock, load it into the boat, park the truck down the street, drive the boat back to the house, and unload everything one more time into the shop.

So when I say we're going 'up the mountain', it's not a small feat.