The drama continues.
So the pump that they put in saturday morning had a bad level sender. Released it to me saturday afternoon since I needed the truck, said they'd get a warranty replacement in and they'd replace that next week.
Up to the mountain saturday night, crew's gearing up. Another SAR assist... one rider missing, probably out of fuel. Go over maps, point-last-seen, point-last-contacted, he's got gear/skills for an overnight if it comes to that. County SAR won't deploy till morning. Headed out to see if we could find the rider.
0200, no rider found, wind + low-viz/blowing snow making the search effort futile. Called it for the night, we'll let SAR deal with it in the morning.
Download/gather GPS tracks, debrief SAR when they arrived, they went out to search. We had an intro class to teach, but I brought my ops radio along if they needed further assistance. SAR ended up finding the guy on a trail that we woudln't have searched - way further south than where he was last-contacted, and not enroute to the truck. Don't know the whole situation, but we saw him as we were doing the class, know he got out safe.
Class was challenging ... in addition to Brian and myself, we had another snow geek shadowing us (LOTS of non-motorized/heli-ski experience, real solid on snow science/avy safety, recently got into snowmobiling) and another rider from Iowa who's interested in becoming an instructor. It was really nice to have that additional support for this class... I certainly needed the assistance.
~50m/h winds had drifted snow all over the parking lot. Gusts so strong with snow stinging your face, making it hard to breathe. Sunday night, get everything packed/loaded, head down the mountain. Got a "Check Gages" light after startup, low alternator output. Great. That cleared after the engine warmed up a bit.
Truck's running fine... coast down the mountain, get to the flats, and when I started to make the pull into town, the truck started vibrating hard. Back off throttle, slow down, vibration isn't changing with RPM or speed. Not what I needed to deal with, but things are still running...
Pull into the fuel station to top off and check out what's going on... pop the hood, and there's a fuckload of snow in the engine compartment. Battery, fuse block, brake amplifier, firewall, all packed with snow.

Fan on the transmission cooler had a bunch of snow packed onto the blades.
Scraped most of the snow out, truck ran fine with no more vibrations the rest of the night.
