First Cold Weather Trial Run
We recently had our first real cold spell up here that happened to fall right over our New Years Eve trip to the cabin which lined up perfectly to see how these will hold up in some relative colder temps. The main river hadn’t completely frozen up yet so we took a longer trail in, about 20 miles each way. Day time we were seeing highs of -26F with the night dropping to -32F. We started with 4 sleds (only 3 started in the cold…), 6 people, 5 dogs, and a little under 6 hours of daylight so a lot of the photos I took outside are kind of dim and grainy.
Getting things ready and packed
We used a couple of the prototypes on the trip and they survived bouncing around in the back of the sled all loaded up. This was quite gratifying to see how well they worked in these conditions. Cold weather operability/functionality was a key objective and I obviously believed they would work with the material and construction combination but you just never know until you get to use them in true cold conditions. It’s pretty amazing what cold temps can do to plastics. We did have a couple plastic casualties due to the cold - water jug valve, snowmachine plastics, and some other containers that are more suited for static storage than an actual gear box.
Hodge podge of pics throughout the trip
All in all, we had a successful trip and I very happy with the performance of the boxes. Couple additional things I found out using them trip:
They lash down quite nicely on a standard width snowmachine 154” tunnel
The lid stayed on the whole drive up and back on the highway on the back of the snowmachine trailer
They fit perfectly width wise on our medium otter sleds which is very convenient. I should’ve know this in advance since it’s pretty identical in size to our 45 quart rotomolded cooler, but slipped my mind and was a pleasant surprise when we were loading things up.
Well you made it to the end, thanks for reading and hope everyone has a great 2024!
Finn & Kara
Pretty brutal view out our main window with the sun about as high as it is going to get for the day.
