Nice diary and good pictures to support it. It’s nice to see that you get along despite the somewhat unordinary weather conditions you’re facing. You just seemed to take what weather has thrown towards you and then found a way to work over it despite the conditions. I like that.
What I’m wondering is whether the conditions on Tuesday were bad that you wouldn’t have been able to go in and get out of the forest. Those forest roads didn’t seem to have that much of a snow (maybe about 5 cm when looking tyre tracks) and I’d be tempted to say that loader even wouldn’t have needed chains at all as it didn’t have any trailer. That is, of course, if there isn’t any killer hills or really soft sections. If your and loaders drive axle tyres are of the same size you could’ve loaned one set of chains from loader if in doubt. Once in forest loader would’ve loaded about half of your load and you would’ve driven out of the woods (with most of the weight on fifth wheel). Then loader would’ve taken one load out of the forest and you would’ve been able to get away much faster (and been safe doing that).
Another thing I’m wondering is more general and comes from pictures I’m seen from your ploughed roads, like in picture below, and from some pictures of your snow ploughs I’m seen (like these).
dingo:
My question is, that do your snow ploughs have only one plough, in front of the rigid? No ploughs under belly or side mounted ploughs? If so, someone could hint your highways agency (or whoever has the responsibility) that they are wasting money when not having these. That “side plough” is really handy when combined to front plough and allows one lorry to plough one lane from center line right into the hard shoulder in one go.
A picture showing side-mounted snow plough in action.
There also seemed to be a really nice video about side mounted plough in action, check out videos Truck 1 and Truck 1 from http://www.arcticmachine.fi/en/arctic-machine/media-bank.