May 19 2024: A handful of us drove out to the Abode for a site visit, to see how things were after four years away from the place.  I wrote up my own preliminary findings, and then turned this page into a longer rundown on the event after it was over.  (Too long after, actually... stuff got busy..)  Anyway, this first part is essentially my report back to the crew on the visit.

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Why, and what's supplying it now?  This new installation of a 250 gallon diesel tank, just up the hill!  It has hoses plumbed straight into the generator's fuel system -- one feed, one pressure-regulator return.  It even has a level gauge, which today read 3/4 full.

Various fix-up work has started around the place.  There is a large punch-list to get the site back into shape, most of which appears to be outsourced to Spiritfire as much of the old Abode crew has moved on.  The tool shed / generator house is receiving a new roof and siding as an ongoing project.  Today, they were working on building a new upper part of the toilet shack, albeit on the same foundation and floor plate.

The multi-room cabins are in pretty good shape, and most of the rooms smell fairly nice [with a touch of cedar, never noticed that before] although a few have a distinct sharp note of mouse pee.  Some of the stair sets up to the farther doors are rather sketchy and need rebuilds.  The small huts down the hill, from "P" back up to "F", also smell fairly strongly of mouse pee with only a couple of exceptions.  They must have always gotten some amount of that every year; how do they usually deal with it??  The huts still appear to be structurally sound in general, just in need of cleaning and deodorization [and maybe rodent eviction].  Hut C is gone; I couldn't find D and E if they still exist.  There are a couple of bigger trees down across what I think is the hut-loop path, between I and J.

The kitchen looks about the same, still with lights we "temporarily" put up years ago and that nasty two-bay deep sink that Tamar hates so much.  Turns out that they use the walk-in fridge for hut mattress storage and various other stuff over winter, likely to keep mold and rodents out.  The compressor electrics underneath the floor look unchanged from what was it, 15 years ago? when Phil installed the stepdown transformer on it.

Our storage shed is just about perfect inside, after four years of stasis and snow loads!  My wire-mesh "gasketing" has done its job, keeping everything but small insects out, and our crates and other storage look fairly pristine like the day it was all put away.  Tamar staged some food-prep stuff into there, for a little less load to bring out for the real event later.

There are two new "deluxe huts", located on either side of "Q", with larger footprints and decent storm-doors.  They don't have power feeds, so we'd have to arrange for that. They could either house guests or become staff office and/or medical as needed.  Waitasec, you ask, why not do that the usual way?  Because both big white tents are *gone*, e.g. the "medical tent" and the dance pavilion, leaving only bare dirt/gravel areas where they stood.

Miscellany:   There's no canopy on the welcome-tent frame, it may still be around??  The "bridge to nowhere" is in good shape, and the "living room" and pole-barn type dining buildings look a little more worn but still solid.  All of the small CFL bulbs we installed there years ago are still in place, and they all still work.  A lot of mowing needs to be done all around, as there's quite a bit of new weed growth over the whole campus.

The parking area needs a good clear, and there's a large tree down across part of the far section that needs to be cut up and removed.  I surveyed a couple of new and different places to hang lights, as various traditionally-used trees have died or changed in some other way.  The road up has been re-graded and a lot of new angular gravel laid down, so it's in pretty good shape albeit still with deep ditches along side in some places.  We may add some additional border markings in June.

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So that was my intial report from the site visit.  It was good to have the overview of what we were getting [back!] into, even though there would still be plenty of unknowns once we arrived for real.  It wasn't that long before it was time to load up our gear and put in our best efforts to make this happen.  I dug up my old packing and to-do lists -- some of us do keep extensive notes year to year, and it really helps for me not racking my brains trying to think of everything from scratch.  The final challenge before getting on the road, of course, was to Tetris my infrastructure gear and all the rest for *two* people into one car, as one of the recurring drumbeats of Baitcon is "carpool! carpool!"

I failed to get a picture of it, but we found that the gas supply company had delivered both full-size LN2 dewars onto the *porch deck* just outside one of the kitchen doors instead of by our usual tree, and the weight had the cantilevered deck structure sagging down in a fairly alarming way.  As we didn't have the tools or brute force to move the dewars gently down to ground level, we did the next best thing: reinforce the deck's support capacity.  I remembered that there were a couple of "hi-lift" beam jacks kicking around in the tool shed, and went to fetch them and some scrap wood and a couple of cinderblocks.  I got the jacks under the edge of the deck and carefully cranked it up back to level, and built a new pier under its main support to keep it there.  Even the most robust wood structures don't last forever out in the weather, and given that the deck in question usually holds a modest collection of stuff headed for recycling, this was a seriously unusual and unsafe load for it.  I'm really glad I spotted that and we caught it in time...

I usually dwell heavily on infrastructure and operational mechanics in these writeups, and this one's no exception.  But what about all the *people*, you might ask?  What were they doing, what were they feeling?  Frankly, as the weekend went forward, they were really just ... enjoying another Baitcon, that had been sorely missed for a while, and folks seemed to quickly get right back into the old groove almost like nothing had thrown everything off in between.

The big difference this year, though, was the Covid testing station down at the other end of the parking area.  Everyone arriving would stop here first, in however long a line of cars was needed to process everyone before they could continue up the hill and unload.  Four years later, people were still coming down with the newer "Omicron" and such variants of the pathogen, so even with the event mostly outdoors we really wanted to be sure that nobody among us would be contagious.

Three judiciously placed big lights were nonetheless enough for the lot; I now have a couple of those really bright "corncob" high-bay LED units that blast brilliant white in every direction.  Putting a reflector behind them is almost a meaningless gesture since they stick out so far beyond it, but I guess it helped somewhat against spilling half the light uselessly into the woods.  We do advise people to bring flashlights anyways...

The fast-charge ports on the Yetis pull about 30 amps at slightly above 12V, so I needed to come straight off the DC/DC converter where it attaches to the battery.  And I wanted to try to charge both of them at once, so 60 amps from the rail in addition to the (modest) overhead of the car's electronics being powered up.

Now, much of the Abode crew this year was new, and while very helpful and enthusiastic, they did not necessarily have all of the institutional memory about the camp's workings and how we managed various parts of it.  It emerged that our main tech contact was still operating under the belief that control of the well pump was still fully manual, i.e. someone had to eyeball the level in the tank higher up the hill, and turn the pump breaker on for some guessworked amount of time.  And later, off again, or the tank would simply overflow once full.  They said the tank did have a float switch, but it had never functioned properly to their knowledge.

So our Abode tech guy had turned off the breaker the previous evening when he left to go down to the Abode residence, figuring that we'd be okay overnight and a substantial ways into the next day.  Well, that turned out to be wrong...

Because the water comes out of the well cold, it's pretty easy to eyeball the rough level from just the condensation on the outside of the tank.  There's also a translucent level sight tube connected from bottom to top, and by now the water had gotten to where the yellow arrow is -- use the big picture, it's a *very* subtle difference and it helps when the level is bouncing up and down a bit.  Which it does while the tank is filling, just from turbulence.

The float switch is a bulb on a longish wire, with a weight clamped to the wire about halfway down.  It looked like the idea was that once the float rose above the weight it would tilt, and presumably shut off the pump.  And indeed, when I picked up the float and turned it over most of the way, the incoming flow of water suddenly ceased!  So despite the sketchy-looking wiring connections outside the tank for it, the switch *was* working!  So why did the crew still think they had to kill the pump manually?

After bit of messing around I thought I had the answer: the whole rig was sitting too high in the tank.  The float switch had to turn almost completely over before the pump shut off, and it looked like there wasn't enough wire between the entry point and the weight to let it do that at a reasonable level, if at all.  So water would be coming out the overflow before the switch could tip up enough, easy to misinterpret as it simply being broken.  I loosened the clamp gland at the entry point and shoved about four or five more inches of wire in, and then when I simulated water lifting the float to a more sensible level, the pump shut off.  So maybe I'd already fixed the problem, but I wouldn't know for many hours yet as the tank had to fill back up first.

So between checking on the tank way *up* the hill and battery-charging way *down*, I got a considerable amount of vertical in that day.  But in between, there was still time to wander around and see what other folks were doing.

The big dance pavilion had *not* been rebuilt in any permanent way, but the Abode folks had simply rented in a large party tent equipped with a rather strange idea of a dance floor.  Black astroturf over plywood?  Really?

I spotted an amusing little vignette of someone's device charging infrastructure, somehow miraculously holding itself connected.  So many people never think about mitigating potential for failure...

The water tank was nearing full by later afternoon, so my checks got more frequent, and I did manage to be up there and see the float turn the pump off by itself -- at a perfect level, just below the upper shoulder of the tank but handily under the overflow level.  So now I could tell the Abode folks they could just leave the well pump breaker on and the system would take care of itself.

The Abode caretakers were actually pretty blown away by how we dug in and fixed all these infrastructure issues and clearly knew what we were doing.  We chatted quite a bit about some of the other improvements they have planned, because Building Stuff is always a fun thing to geek out on and we've come up with our share of positive ideas for the place.

As in the past, I took the role of fire-meister on various evenings.  The Abode folks had started one on Friday so I didn't have to worry about it until later, but the rest of the weekend was evidently up to us.

This year the fire-ring had been remade in a *huge* scale; Spiritfire or some group must have done a monster burn here, maybe to celebrate the reopening of the mountain camp within their own communities, and our modest little blaze only occupied a small fraction of it despite efforts to keep it fairly well-fueled.

To sum up, if it's not obvious, it was great to be back.  Next year in New Leb!