About half way through the day of repairing and installing customers, Breen and Hesperus went down. Par for the course on a Friday afternoon. We investigated further and found there was a problem with the backhaul between Smelter to Montoya tower.  We had to go up to Smelter anyway to finish installing a link for a customer, so we headed up there. Once there, we looked into the problem and after some troubleshooting we determined that we would have to go to the Montoya tower. We finished up the customer's link and headed to the Montoya tower.

Keep in mind that the Montoya tower is one of the most interesting towers to get to. The first portion of the trip is driving through a field with grass that is about 3ft to 4ft high.

It took us about an hour to drive through this because there are culverts and ditches throughout the field and a stream running through it at depths of 15ft or more in places. So we had to find a way around it and I had Michael walk in front of me so the truck didn't fall into one since we couldn't see where we were going because the grass was so high.

At one point (I wish I was filming this) Michael was walking along, I was driving about 15ft behind him and he just disappeared into the grass. He fell into one of the ditches.

After an hour of dodging ditches and culverts, we got back on the road to climb to the top of the ridge. When I say road, I am speaking generally because there really isn't much of a road.

In fact, in places you question whether you are imagining that there is a road there.

After a long drive through the field and the countryside filled with brush, holes, ditches, boulders and driving over fallen trees, we arrived at the tower.

We quickly realized that there was no power to the building, so we went over to the power pole and this is what we saw........

Now, you may notice that the power is in the on position. It was not when we arrived. that big old switch was in the off position. How the hell did this happen?  There were no tracks from a vehicle coming up to the top of the ridge because we blazed our own trail up there. The only thing that we could come up with is that a cow, or elk wandered by and figured it was a great place to take a break and get a good scratch on.

Driving through a treacherous grass field, up a steep ridge through an imaginary road and getting back home at 9:30 at night on a Friday because a cow turned your power off, priceless.