Fifty Shades of Grey on Ice

   Bear Lake is covered in ice again after a week of weather changes and dramatic wind.
  Monday we had heavy rain and winds at 30 gusting to as high as 60 mph.   That's enough wind to wake me in the night and send porch furniture sailing around the yard.  That's enough wind to make waves on the two inches of water laying atop the lake's icecap.  That's enough wind to bow windows and make one thankful for every hurricane clip and extra strap build into this house.  That's enough wind to drive the rain under eight feet of porch roof to strike my the windows on the north wall.  But that was then and this is now.  Such is the weather of Bear Lake.

      The last two nights have been clear and cold so that the ice is rebuilding and we are feeling a bit more like late February even without the snow.  We have basically given up significant snow fall this year.  The ice though has been reworked we were back on our Nordic skates (wrote about nordic skates last winter and the blog is still available)  today scooting tentatively about on slabs of ice that now has the look of a shattered windshield.  Cracks run in every directions and spiderweb the surface.  We don't often get to watch the ice on the lake change and age as we have this year.  The layers of snow hide the crack and breaking ice and muffle the sounds.  This year without snow, the visuals and audio are dramatic.  The lake was all asparkle  today in the morning sun like some one spilled their cache of rhinestones.  When we glided out on the ice surface we found ourselves skating across textured marble then crystal glass then pale, fine-textured granite all in the shades between black, white, and silver.  Some places the ice appeared shattered and refrozen into kaleidoscopes in fifty shades of grey.  

Out toward center of the lake, we crossed ice that was countertop smooth but textured into a fine sandy look -- excellent skating.  This expanse stretched probably half a mile across the lake and down the center of this overflow was a major crack that gapped as much as two inches and in one part was lifted the same distance.  I have to think the ice ruptured here and water came up from below to flow and freeze into this beautiful rink.
     Of course, with all this cracking and shattered ice the lake has not been silent.  Last night entertainment was sitting in the hot tub counting the stars and listening to the rumble and crunch of the lake tectonics.  The ice has been moving and moaning for days which is fun to listen to unless it is right under your feet when you skating then, no matter how thick the ice, one can get pretty nervous.  I think the ice is thick enough over most of the lake to support us skaters but every time things warm up I get nervous.  The ice is thin or non existent along the shore especially where little springs bubble up through the lake bottom along the shallow south shore.  Most of those places are shallow and a skater would only get wet and scared.  So we skate on, cautious and jumpy, but helplessly seduced by the  shattered glass lines and infinite shades of grey on the ice of Bear Lake.

Feeding the Musher, meals for the Iditarod

Travis Beals of Turning Heads Kennels is getting ready for the Iditarod and for most of our small minds, "getting ready" means training hard with the dogs, covering miles and miles of trails, followed by campouts under the stars for practice.  In reality, there is lot more to it than that.   Sarah Stokey's great blog on the Turning Heads website can give a good look at what's involved in gearing up for a thousand miles and two race starts for sixteen dogs and musher.  Madelyn and I are all excited about our friend Travis' third go at the trail, and we put our kitchen where our mouth is and took over feeding the musher during the race.
     We have noticed over the years that although the mushers plan every detail of their dogs' diet, the musher's food is often a last minute thrown together collection of whatever is handy.  Not good.  Madelyn decided that this year we needed to help out with feeding Travis on the trail and then few weeks ago, she decided that we needed to take over the musher food altogether.  So, the Walker kitchen has been rockin' rollin' this week.  
      First we met with Sarah and Travis to talk about menus and packing and the eating routine on the trail.  It turns out that the mushers usually pack sealed meals that they can drop in the heating dog water and then open and eat after their dogs are fed and resting.  This meant cooking, freezing then vacuum sealing high calorie, appetizing food this is easy for a tired, dehydrated, trail-worn musher to consume and digest.  
       If you haven't watched mushers work or driven a dog team yourself, you might not know what a physically demanding activity it is to be a dog driver on the the Iditarod.  These athlete have to be tough as their dogs, operate on less sleep, and perform with no one to feed them massage their aching joints, pull of their boots and tuck them in like the dogs do.  When they reach the checkpoint, the dogs lie down and wait for food while the musher without so much as a drink of water or a trip to the head spend the next hour more tending their dogs like a personal butler.  I think many a musher has fallen back or had to drop out because he/she was the weak link on the team.   Anyway, Madelyn wanted to make sure that Travis have plenty of high powered tasty food waiting in each of his drop bags that was easy to get to eat and with some snack to stick in his pockets for later.
       We made a plan to produce or collect 35-40 meals which we would freeze and vacuum seal then pack in gallon plastic bags with additional snacks so that each time Travis pick up dog food he also had food for him,  some of which could be eaten immediately like a Madelyn's cookie bar or Christan McLain's peanut butter fudge.  Others, like Trio bars or Snickers, (courtesy of Major Marine Tours) could be stuffed in a pocket for trail snacks.  Mushers all pack drop bags that are delivered to the checkpoints along the trail.  These bags have things like dog food, extra booties,  headlamp batteries, and clean socks.   They will also have packages of food Travis can prepare when he feeds his dogs or keep in the sled bag to use later.   When the dogs are chowing down on kibble and salmon stew, Travis can dine on Chinooks smoked scallop mac and cheese, Moose Muse seven layer bars, homemade lasagna, or his favorite, a couple slices of pepperoni pizza.  

        The pizza was a challenge because all the food has to be frozen, and the only dependable way to reheat food on the trail is in the dog food cooker.  This means the pizza has to live through freezing and rewarming in a vacuum sealed retort.  I was sure there was a way to make this work, and I opened my own personal test kitchen.  With a fresh baked pizza to experiment with, I cut and froze the pizza then wrapped pieces in foil or cellophane and vacuum sealed them and stored them in the freezer.  Reheated in boiling water for a few minutes the foil wrapped slice came out quite nicely.  The dough was firm and tasty and the sauce intact and not messy.  The cellophane pieces tasted fine but the cellophane formed a skin that had to be cut into with a knife making that a messy hassle.  The foil method is a success, and I am confident now that somewhere down the trail, Travis is going to enjoy a tasty treat of hot pepperoni pizza and be envy of the dog lot.  

      But, as they say on TV, Wait, there's More!  Beside pepperoni pizza, Seward's Eureka Pizza donated wonderful chicken and spinach stromboli, and meaty pasta salad; Peking Restaurant gave fried rice and their famous Mongolian beef.   Travis will feast on  breakfast sandwiches and energy bars, meatballs with pasta or sausage and potatoes, he'll snack on smoked salmon and seven layer bars, and, of course, the old dependable peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  
       At this point, we have to admit that this is a big experiment and Travis is our Guinea pig.  Only after the race will we know if we picked food that would entice him to eat, if we packed in a way that may it easy to stoke his furnace,  and if we really can serve pizza on the Iditarod trail.    More on all of this later when we debrief the Iditarod food fest.  

My Firewood Compulsion -- Conclusion

       

My tree fell to the north as planned without hanging against the neighboring tree and slid smoothly through the branches of other trees that reached out to catch it. I immediately shed my jacket and hat then started cutting limbs away with the steam rising from my shoulders as the work heated up.  Next, I notched the log with a handax every fourteen inches, using marks on the handle to measure off rounds.  Following the curve of the log with its tip pointing toward the lake, I pushed back the fallen limbs to clear a work area before starting to the trunk into rounds.  

       It’s commonly said that firewood heats twice, but in my experience it’s more like three or four times.  I heat up first while bucking up a tree until I’m working in shirt sleeves on a cold winter day, and then sweat up good getting it hauled in to the wood yard, sometimes twice if we are toting it out of the woods to a truck or a sled then unloading it again back home. After that it’s back to shirt sleeves again splitting and stacking. That’s a lot heat from a stick of wood that’s never had a match put to it.  

       The lake was only a few yards from the trail and through the woods I could see a pair of goldeneye ducks on last open water.  My back told me a break was in order, so I paused before starting the chainsaw again, bathing for a time in the cool dampness of the woods before hard winter.  The tree gave off the aroma of forest and life and earth.  The golden-eyes called as they flew.  Somewhere nearby, a squirrel chattered.  The air is damp and has been for several days, so the trees and brush glisten with moisture.  I am glad there will no need for this wood until next year when it’s dry.  

        Most years, I stay ahead of my firewood, so that I am only burning dry, aged wood.  There have been years though when that wasn’t true, and I remember a load of green spruce and hemlock delivered to my driveway in a snowstorm, so when I came home that evening, I faced a messy mound of snow soaked leaden wood that was not only green and wet, but also too long for my stove.   That was a tough lesson I learned well.  I now have a nice woodshed with four separate stalls. I sort my wood by age and dryness and even have a place to split kindling out of weather. I like to mix in birch with my spruce so we can bank a warm fire on cold nights.  

       Firewood burns best when well aged, and this is best accomplished by splitting then stacking it bark down under cover with plentiful ventilation.  To accomplish this, I built the shed with doors and a tight roof to keep out the snow and rain, but the eaves are open and the siding gapped to let air move through.  

Most of the wood in this climate comes in wet and takes quit a time to dry. Right now, I have one cord of green wood split and stacked that came from trees blown down in last fall’s storms.  That should be ready to use in the spring.  Another compartment is a mix of hemlock and birch that we will use during the cold windy months of December and January.  One bin held a cord left over from last year.  We used it first.  
      My most recent wood came from a tree in a friend’s yard that has been dead for at least a couple of years but it has been in the weather and needs to dry.  Piled on top of that is the wood from the last tree I took down along highway, a dead spruce that needed a few extra months to age, and be ready in late winter or early spring. By the end of April I will generally be looking at three empty wood bins unless I have gathered some standing dead trees from along the lake shore during the winter and spring. 

        I have learned to appreciate the nasty winds that lash the lake in the stormy fall months because they often topple trees not far from my woodshed. The spruce trees have a frail root system that spreads out in a shallow ring around trunk without pushing down very far into the ground.  When the ground is wet and the wind blows a gale some are apt to topple with the root wad sticking up like a rough table turned on edge.  Many times if one cuts through the base of the trunk so it separates from the roots, the roots will fall back near to their original position with the stump pointed at the sky.  Another scary and dangerous event that can take a wood cutter by surprise.  

      When wind storms topple trees, or break off their tops, they are handy to collect with the ATV or snow machine and get stacked under tarps for the winter. Come spring they’re split and lie out in the air during the dryer weeks of May and early June when they loose a lot of moisture and the fair white wood turns brown like the skin of a sunbather. I try to get the wood under cover by the end of June, which usually has more wet days than dry, and wood left out will collect moisture instead of loosing it. 

      The drying cordwood will get hauled to the woodshed and stacked bark-side-down in neat ricks to continue drying under a roof.  Sometimes I’ll have help from Madelyn or one the kids, but if not I don’t mind.  I’d rather spend an hour hauling and stacking firewood than working out at the gym. 

       My brother Tom always said I didn’t get to haul enough wood as a kid to be sick of it. He did.  Those first Alaska winters, Tom was the oldest all that work cured him of ever wanting a crackling wood fire in his house. He swore off wood heat for life, and so did all my other siblings. I’m the oddball with my woodstove and penchant for wood cutting.

      I know I have it pretty good for wood gathering, what the the Chugach National Forest at my back door and state forest all around the lake. I can even collect firewood along the highway, a sort of firewood roadkill.  I like to go look for a nice tree the way other people are spotting for bears or goats. On my regular trips to Anchorage, I usually have my saw in the truck and I road hunt for down or dead trees to take, if not this trip then the next.  It not uncommon after a meeting in in Anchorage to stop and change clothes find a tree and load up with rounds to bring home. 

       There are a lot of places in the state where wood getting is a lot different.  At my cabin near Trapper Creek, I burn birch with a blase' recklessness since it's more available than spruce and wish I could tote it home. In western Alaska, the Kuskokwin and the Yukon Rivers empty into the Bering Sea through a flat delta empty of trees, so wood cutters there work off the beach collecting driftwood.  Logs that wash up are stacked to dry above the hight tide line until freeze-up then snow machines and sled are used to haul the trove to the house, unless a storm surge drives the sea up the beach and scatters the logs with the indifference sweep of chance.  

       Upriver, forests line the rivers but wood getters still have to travel miles from the village for a wood.  This is a winter chore because the frozen ground and packed snow make a highway for the big plastic toboggans that will haul eight to ten eight birch logs behind a snow machine. A fellow told me that birch logs felled in the cold of winter will burn well that same month because they hold so little moisture. No matter where they gather fuel, wood cutters never seem to talk about it like it’s work. Like me, they seem to be mining those same brain chemicals that work on runners and gym rats. The difference is we come home with fuel as well as a feeling of well-being.  

       Even endorphins can’t overcome age though , and I have made concessions these last few years. After my shoulder surgery, the doctor made me give up the splitting maul and buy a hydraulic log splitter.  And when I have a big or troublesome tree to drop, I call my son-in-law who is still spry enough to wrestle a hundred pound spruce round into the back of a truck. 

       This tree I have just cut and hauled to the house is dry enough for using this year, and it’s not a big tree. The straight-grained rounds without big knots, I will stack beside the woodshed.  Each morning for a week, I’ll ignore the log splitter and stand dry rounds one at time on the chopping block.  A sharp ax with a fiberglass handle, moves comfortably in my hand as I begin the rhythm of the rising and falling blade.  When the ax hits the wood, I can tell by by feel if the wood has begun to split. Straight dry grain splits eagerly as the ax cleaves and snaps a slice off from the round or the round falls open in its halves.  Rise and fall, split and toss, shed the hat and jacket, until I am surrounded by wedges of clean spruce.  

       I work the wood in spurts these days, stopping to look over the lake off and on and even leaving a stack of rounds under a tarp for a couple of days rather than working myself stiff to split them all in one day.  Too much of that sort of work makes my back ache and my hands will be numb when I wake in the morning, but I have to take all of these as signs of life, not age.  I suppose the day will come when I’ll be like my brother and say I’ve had enough of burning wood, but I hope that day is a long way off.  Someday, I probably will have to buy firewood, but that will take some of the sugar off the cookie.  Just because it makes me hurt it doesn’t mean I have to quit. 

  When snow finally comes, I will hook a sled to the snow machine and ride along the lake edge scouting for trees.  Along with the spruce, I often find hemlock, a dense wood that makes good fuel.  I look for a standing, dead tree that's close to the lake and not on a steep bluff that I can’t get to.  

In the flat light of winter, I can sped a while staring up a tree-top trying figure out if I'm seeing green needles or not.  

       A good tree is one that falls to frozen lake without hanging in the limbs of another and proves to be mostly solid, not punky with rot.  Once the tree is down, I strip down to shirt sleeves and buck the trunk into rounds, haul the limbs to the shore and make several trips with the snow machine and sled to the house.  I tell Madelyn I've brought her “fresh” wood, just picked.  
       On a fine cold day with no wind, I’ll end my work on the porch, my gloves laid in by the fire to dry and steam rising off my shoulders as I sip coffee and wait for the early darkness of late winter. 

#####

My Firewood Compulsion -- Part Two

     

On the eastern Kenai Peninsula, we have four trees to choose from for fuel: spruce, hemlock, birch, and cottonwood.  Cottonwood is the least attractive because it carries a lot of water, and it doesn’t have much heat in it when it finally dries.  Birch is the best fuel in the our forest, but there is not as much of it, and there are few standing dead trees worth burning.  A standing dead birch is apt to be punky and useless under its healthy looking bark.  Birch bark is waterproof and holds the moisture in the dead wood so it rots quickly, but the bark remains intact.  I’ve walked up to a twelve-inch birch standing dead in the forest that appeared from the outside to be healthy.  I leaned on the tree, and it fell over, a tube of bark filled with powder top to bottom.  Creosote in the bark preserves it, but the wood inside stays wet and rots.  It’s rare to find a standing dead birch that is worth hauling home. 

      Hemlock and spruce, both evergreens, are user-friendly and plentiful.  Hemlock on the high, well-drained slopes and spruce on the hillsides and valleys.  Every stand of spruces will have a few dead trees that are dry as the proverbial popcorn fart, and ready to warm a cabin.  Even if the base is rotted and punky, the top will usually be finely cured and ready to burn.  The evergreens contain lots of creosote, so one gets a hot fast fire that burns down quickly since it is not very dense. One only has to heft dry spruce then dry birch to discover the difference.  Birch is a dense, low creosote fuel that will burn long and slow.  Even green birch will burn nicely if laid on a bed of hot coals.  The two woods work together well to heat cabins with the inefficient woodstove that my homesteader parents were using in 1958.  

    Dad’s observations from our first year in Alaska:

The spruce trees are just like Christmas trees, one long tapered pole with limbs not very big nor very long.  I cut one 12 inch at best about 40 feet tall. Trimmed it and blocked it up in wood in 15 minutes.  It was dead not good for lumber but sure burns good, lot like pine.  The green don’t burn so good but works pretty good mixed.  Mom, you asked if the range would heat the cabin, it does now too good but we brought our little heating stove too.  You see several stoves up here made of old oil drums.  Put a door in one and the stovepipe in the other. Lay the drum down and put legs out.   

      The stoves of the 1950s were not efficient, and the barrel stoves were among the worst. Dad said they were made to burn wood not heat houses.  That meant cord after cord of wood had to be sawed, hauled, stacked, and split when it is the sole source of heat in a airy cabin with little or no insulation. We were heating a log cabin that was pretty tight, so there wasn’t a lot of air moving through the house to cool it off.  However, the attic wasn’t insulated the first winter and there was no vapor barrier like a house built in the last twenty or thirty years would have. Even this cabin with floors mom called, “the warmest floors we have ever had” would be losing heat through the attic, where only an inch of lumber and a few layers of tar paper lay between the hot cabin and the Alaskan winter. Mornings were cold in that cabin, but many other cabins were a lot colder.  As Dad said in a letter to grandpa:

Winter has really leveled off at around zero.  Eleven below one night.  The past six nights have been zero or below.  We have been very comfortable though and are more pleased with our house every cold day or night.  We seem bothered less by the cold weather than the old timers.  It takes lots of wood to keep warm due to the fact that spruce is a lot like pine or willow.  When its green it burns slow until it gets started then gets hot as ________ but don’t last and you’d better get more in before it gets too low or it will go out. It’s just wonderful dead and dry but burns awful fast.  A little piece of paper will start it real good.  It has never froze in the house of a night even when fires went clear out before morning.  We’ve kept eggs in the bedroom window and they’re not frozen either.

     No matter how warm the house was at bedtime, even coal or a birch log would burn out long before morning, and we woke to a cold cabin. Some cold nights I’m sure Dad was up feeding the fire in the middle of the night. Luckily, even a cold cabin would heat up fast with a dry spruce fire in the box stove.  By the time breakfast was cooked and eaten, the place was toasty as an oven. With two stoves going, the temperature would rise from “colder than hell” to “open a door!” in next to no time.

       One of the two stoves was a Home Comfort Range that became the center of our cabin at Happy Valley. This giant iron stove had a big oven and a firebox on the left for feeding firewood.  Above the cook surface were two warming ovens that seemed to always have bread rising or a pot of beans warming.  Attached on one end of the stove was a reservoir for hot water.  Dad reported to Grandma:

       That old Home Comfort sure makes these women up here set up and take notice. Most of them don’t have any way that good a stove.  They sure do drool.   It hardly got a scratch on the way and sure does bake good bread. Briar bakes 12 loaves at a time about 3 times a week.  The boys have slowed down on it a little but not much.  

      That Home Comfort range was busy from dawn to bedtime.  I can remember listening from under a wool quilt as Dad built the morning fires, trotted out back to take a leak, and then hopped back into bed until the place warmed up.  The coffee pot was readied on the stove the night before and soon was perking us all awake, although we kids stayed deep in our beds as long as possible.  

By the time we tumbling from beds, the stove was roaring, and much good would come of that.  Many a cold winter morning, we rushed from our beds to stand in front of an open oven to change from our pajamas into to our clothes. We had sourdough pancakes off the griddle, moose sausage and eggs, hot coffee and oatmeal from the cooktop.  Most memorable was the constant flow of baked goods.  Biscuits, cornbread, rolls, pies and cookies were floating of that oven.  Mom said, “I have to bake bread every other day. Eight loaves every other day does very well.”

     There is nothing quite like fresh roll or the end of a hot loaf of bread smeared with butter eaten in a kitchen toasted by a woodstove and smelling of baked goods.  I now realize how much wood that must have needed.  That’s probably why the cookstove was gone by 1964, replaced with propane, and Dad put in a oil furnace for heating. I’m sure he missed walking out on a frosty morning to drop one of those “Christmas trees” and savor the aroma of evergreen sap as the branches fell away under his saw. During those first winters, Dad would spend a good part of each week, if not each day, gathering or splitting firewood, and some of it green.  Maybe he finally had enough.

      I sometimes wish I had a massive wood cookstove with warming oven and all the smells and flavors that went with it, but I’m not sure I want or need another stove feed. Even when a person enjoys wood getting as much as Dad and I, it stops being fun when you’re feeding two or three hungry stoves.  My woodstove does have a little oven that works for roasting meet or baking if the timing is right, but it’s not the whole deal.  I have a wood-fired sauna and a wood-heated guest cabin on my property besides the woodstove in the house, which explains why I am glad to find any prime tree like the one was I dropping this morning.  

      This tree I was up against was standing dead, but not dead long, with perhaps a year of standing without any green needles making plant sugars and drawing water up the trunk. Now it was coming down -- if I did everything right or got lucky.  I cut a deep notch on the north side, a bird’s mouth made of two cuts about a third of way through the trunk.  With this notch in place, a cut opposite it should send the tree toppling north, toward the lake, away from the companion tree that invites it to stay upright, and through a spider web of branches waiting to cradle it and ruin my buzz. I wanted to practice my woods craft and drop the tree across to the south again the lean, but that’s a tricky proposition and there is a good chance I would prop it against it’s partner and have to try and drag it down with the four-wheeler, but this is not a day for hassles; it’s about gathering firewood.  --- To be continued

My Firewood Compulsion -- part one

I derive a certain pleasure from awareness of our gift of wood.  Besides giving me its chemical and utilitarian benefits, like the fireplace that warms the soul as well as the body,” the tree and its wood are a most necessary part of my life’s esthetic enjoyment.    -- Eric Sloan: Reverence for Wood

     I was moping around the house the other day, grousing about weather too cold for boating and too warm for skiing.  The frost was on the ground but no snow to go with it and just enough moisture around to make roads and trails treacherous.  Madelyn looked up and said, “Don’t you have a tree to cut down somewhere?”  

     “Yup, I was thinking about that.”

     “Well, go ahead, you know you’ll feel better.”   

     In ten minutes, I had the trailer hooked to the four wheeler with the chainsaw, the ax, and ear muffs in the wooden tool tray on the front. Waiting down the trail along the lake was a standing dead spruce with a heavy lean that I had been meaning to cut for some time. It stands closely nestled to another tree, so it had gone unnoticed by other firewood hunters.  As I sighted up the bark of that trunk to measure the lean and then around it to track the projected fall line, I felt the focus of that work push all my tension out of the way, and I was immersed in the wood.  

     The tree leaned to the northwest nearly touching its neighbor, but it was bowed to the north as well.  Any hope of dropping it cleanly across the trail was gone.  I would have to use wedges and careful notch the tree to the north and hope the weight of it would push it through the branches of its neighbor, but it would most likely slide off to the east where it could hang on other trees.  If a falling tree doesn’t get enough momentum, even frail branches of a small tree can catch it and hold hostage a future pile of firewood.  The cut tree will lean precariously overhead taunting the woodcutter.  I can horse a small tree around be hand and convince
it to fall safely to earth, and sometimes, I run a rope out from a four-wheeler, truck or snow-machine to drag the butt off the stump and away to bring the leaner to earth.  But usually, I face one of these widow makers alone in the forest with a only chainsaw, ax, and ingenuity for allies, and then I must choose between a dangerous challenge or a prudent walk-off, hoping the next windstorm will put things right.  

     Madelyn says that my quest for fuel, for bucking up a log and bringing it home to burn is a salve for my soul, that firewood is my yoga.  When I am out of sorts and grim-facing or just fretting, she tries to send me off to the woods to get firewood.  She claims it steadies my ship, and I do love to go out with a chainsaw and work a tree down into firewood rounds, bring them home, and stack them until I’m tired and dirty. Then I am at peace with my world, feeling worthy.

     It's not just about satisfaction of getting fuel for the winter, there is a reward in working in this medium, kind of an organic “going to the source” sort of feeling.  And there is beauty in fresh cut rounds of birch neatly stacked with white bark shining. There is aesthetic geometry in ricks of spruce with their wedged ends facing out to us, so uniform yet each unique, each split with an eye to following grain to work around knots.  The aroma of sap released in a spray of fresh chip is a pheromone trigger for me. These are images and smells as old as my memory.    

     My time with firewood started, I guess, back in 1958 when my family homesteaded on the Kenai Peninsula. Most everybody was burning wood because it was cheaper than oil, cheaper because the labor used to gather wood wasn’t worth much, and it required a lot of labor. Local coal was also available on the beach, but this meant hauling and most of the beach was only accessible by four wheel drive, not a common accessory on the vehicles of the fifties.  Even those who did burn coal would use wood to get fires started because the coal was hard to start from scratch. Wood, on the other hand, was plentiful right out the back door for we were all clearing land and our backyards were our woodlots. 

     When we moved in to our new cabin, Dad thought he had plenty of scrap and slab left over from milling and building, but we went through that faster than we did moose meat. Folks like us, in their first year on the land, had to make time for collecting enough fuel in the fall to last until spring or expect to peck away at it all winter.       A cord of wood is one hundred twenty-eight cubic feet or a stack four feet by four feet by eight feet. While I get by with three cord a year, a 1950’s homestead cabin with a good stove might go through twice that.  That’s a cord a month, October through April.  There was plenty of wood right out the backdoor but the real stickler was finding dry wood.  Most firewood is cut from green trees then split and left to cure for a year or more. During the first year in a our new cabin, my Dad didn’t have year’s worth of stored dry wood, so we scrounged what dead trees could be found and then made do with slow burning green wood that would foul the chimney and generally disappoint.  

     Before emigrated to Alaska, the Walkers farmed the Ohio Valley, which is rich in hardwoods, clean burning woods with lots of BTUs and nothing like Alaska’s tree varieties.  An armload of oak or maple will go a lot farther toward keeping a cabin warm than an wheelbarrow full of spruce. I’m sure that it took Dad a while to figure out the ins and outs of the boreal forest woodlot where a there wasn’t a stick of maple, elm, or oak to be found.       
      Here on Bear Lake, we are limited to spruce, hemlock, cottonwood, and some alder gets big enough to bother with.   If I want birch I have to drive for it.  We're are in a rain forest, the northern end of the temperate coastal rainforest.  Less than ten miles to the north one enters the boreal forest, or taiga, where spruce and birch are king.    ---Too be continued

Weather Hold in Hooper Bay

I am weathered in Hooper Bay, a long way from my lake. No planes have come through for two days, first stopped first by ice, then fog, then wind, and now a bit of it all, blowing up a white-out so the eye doctor that planned to snow machine to Chevak is still here thanks to the good judgement of his ride.  I’ll cook my dinner of macaroni and sausage in the staff lounge and chat with the janitors, while the wind howls out of the north, scattering the snow that tries for the ground. 

The winter, late in coming, is finally laying ahold of this land, hardening the ground with frost, building drifts with the tussocks of basket grass, and layering ice upon ice.  Out on the Bering Sea, the bergs drift like abandoned boats and the open boats are abandoned on the shore lying askew like slabs of ice left by the tide. Soon this delta will be a great white expanse of frozen desert stretching from the Sea to the frozen Kuskokwim River where the dog mushers are racing  300 miles on a trail of ice scratched out of the frozen river.  Without significant snow, four-wheelers compete with sno-gos for the roadway, and even the few trucks in town are still about, making their way without the usually barriers of snow to have them parked for the winter.  

The NOAA weather site says Freezing rain advisory in effect until midnight, but I’m just seeing snow building up in the school yard.  I’m rooting for snow over rain.  I hear wind harder now, swirling around the school in the night, but life in the village goes, and I see the lights of snowmachines and fourwheeler out and about. Earlier a woman asked if I was waiting to fly out.  “No planes today,” she said, “Tomorrow maybe.” then she added, “Some one is waiting for a medivac.  They need it bad.”  That stopped me from pouting about not sleeping in my own bed tonight. Talk about perspective!  As she walked away she said, “It takes a lot of faith to live in the village.”

Starting January without Snow

         

       Now that winter has arrived -- albeit later than usual-- it came without snow, and so we make do on this first week of January with incredible ice.  At our door is now the finest of natural skating rinks, acres and acres of polished frozen Bear Lake.  

We have ice skating, kick-sledding and yesterday an iceboat arrived.   I was so inspired by the ice and it’s polishing wind that I spent an hour in the garage building a skate sail.  I have done this once before and reveled in the speed that can be attained with a scrap of tarp and some wood strips.  Ice-skate sail was a popular sport a hundred years ago in the northeast, so there are many designs for skate sails to be found in old magazines or on the web.

It is still is big in the Scandinavian countries where folks are even more avid winter sports enthusiast than Alaskans. 

This skate sail is handheld and measures about sixty-six inches on a side.  I made it from a six by eight plastic tarp cut to a square and attached to one inch spruce spars with staples and zip-ties.  The wood pieces are tied together with zip-ties also through holes I drilled.  The design is very much like a kite.  In fact, my first skate sail was just that, a giant kite in the traditional diamond shape.  Plans for this sail can be found at:  http://frozentime.se/skiing/segel_english.html. Or search for “skate sail” and find another great design.  I found a great video on Youtube from 1926 of skate sailors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yVWg7-KFe0

I tested my sail last night in the moonlight and again this morning.  In winds above ten miles an hour it scoots me along nicely and at fifteen I was flying.  Madelyn and I with went out on the ice after dinner to glory in the moon glow on ice with snow covered peaks in the background.   Without headlamps we could cruise along on our great glass table of a lake as if we owned it.  In the distance we could see the starlike headlamps of the neighbors on their little patch of perfect January without snow.