Blog has been moved

I have moved the blog to a different host site. www.foreveralaska.wordpress.com Click on this link to get there. Hope to see you there. Thanks, Jared.

Wi-Fi extension to the lake cabin!

After talking about it for about a year, Doug finally took a chance and ordered a point to point wi-fi antenna kit. His original idea was to set up a wireless cam system around his property. At one point to keep an eye on the 4 wheeler on the other side of the river and another to view the trumpeter swans that nest somewhere around the lake every year. Since I already have a small power setup at the lake, he figured that was a good place to start. Doug has worked with wireless boosters in the past without much success so he didn't have too much faith in this latest antenna setup. This system works by plugging a network cable into the internet router at Doug's cabin, that feeds into a little black box, and is plugged into a power source. From there a length of coaxial cable is attached to an antenna/dish that is mounted on the outside of the cabin. When attaching the antenna to Doug's cabin I had to estimate where to aim the antenna being you can't see the lake cabin from his property. Mean while down at the lake cabin the antenna setup is just reversed from the host/Doug's site. After experimenting with several different antenna locations and working out a compromise with signal strength versus cable length, so the coax would reach the cabin, the antenna ended up on a tree about 35 feet from the cabin. And to my surprise after passing through a pretty thick stand of spruce I still get about 70-80% signal strength! This setup should give Doug and I a good start on setting up a wireless camera setup around the property. And as a bonus to that, I in turn get internet service at the lake, whenever Doug has the internet turned on. The pics above show the the antenna setup at the lake cabin and the progression of the signal into my netbook computer. I forgot to snap a photo of the antenna at Doug's but this should give you a good idea of how it works. On final note I will be moving the blog to a different host site soon due to a lot of issues with blogspot, one of them being the formatting which you can see in the previous post which I cannot fix. The name will be changing and when I have the new site up and running I'll leave a link to it on this site.

Too Much Rain!

Due to an excessive amount of rain early this summer a lot of the the trail leading out of the Chatanika valley has washed out. As a temporary fix a couple short diversion trails have been cut, but the long term solution is to cut about a mile of new trail from the river up the hill.

Doug had started a new section of trail from the river a couple years ago but it needs to be connected to the main road about a mile up the hill side. We have started a new trail from the road a ways up the hill that we intend on connecting to the old trail Doug cut a couple years ago.

Right now the trail is Doug's main focus so he can start hauling freight to the river to stock up for freeze up and the beginning of winter. Of course freeze up is still a few months away, but cutting trail is a very slow and labor intensive process. A good day of cutting trail may mean only making 50 to 100 yards a day!

I have helped with some of the trail work but I have also fired up the saw mill, finally, to get some lumber cut for both Doug and I. We got a late start on the saw mill due to all the rain this summer and I have spent some time in town looking for work as well.

The photos above show the major damage to the trails from water this summer. In a couple pics you should be able to make out the ruts left by the 4 wheeler tires showing how much trail washed away.

New additions to the family

Another thing that happened while I was in town was the geese and the swans both had babies. Doug's geese started out with three new born chicks but the local raven population dropped that down to two. The older geese are ever vigilant now, and always keep one eye on the sky.

I thought for sure the trumpeter swans, that nest on the lake, wouldn't have any babies due to all of the traffic during the fires, but I was wrong. I'am happy to report there are five "little," swan babies floating around on the lake feeding with their parents. Don't have a good picture of them yet but I'll keep trying.

Garden update

Here's a look at the garden after spending a few weeks in town and letting mother nature run it's course. To my surprise the local wildlife didn't touch any of the plants while I was gone. A couple days after I left the river it began raining and continued to rain almost everyday, for a few hours a day. The rain lasted for a few weeks and made my time in town a little miserable but on the up side the garden got watered everyday! As you can see even with out any fertilizer things did pretty good.

The radish plants were definitely ready to come out, and doing so opened up more room for the carrots. Iceberg and romaine lettuce plants are doing fantastic but the cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower didn't seem to take off. Doug pointed out that they require a lot of nutrients to keep them going so I probably won't be getting any of those out of the garden this year.

Fighting fires with a helicopter

Today I have a short video clip one of the fire fighting helicopters at work. The lake makes for a great fill station, but unfortunately the deepest part of the lake is where the beaver lodge is on the lake property. When the helicopter flies over and hovers at the lake to fill it's water bucket it can be quite noisy, and when I'm working in the yard I have to wear ear plugs. They seem to make trips from the lake up the ridge for several hours to tame down some hot spots, then the wind will pick up and it will start all over again after a couple hour break. Last night and most of today I could hear chainsaws way up on the ridge so the fire crews must be making some kind of fire break up there. Today I also hiked up 7 mile, over half way, to get a better view of what the fires are doing and what they have done. From the north slope I had a pretty good view of the south slope and ridges of the Chatanika valley. I could see a lot of different spots that have been burned out and how close the fires have been to Doug and I.

The Garden and other Work

Here's a look at the current state of the garden and some of the other work I have been doing around the lake property. Some of the veggies I have in the garden were started in Doug's atrium and green house a couple months ago. That has to be done with some plants due to the short growing season here in Alaska. All of those plants, and the ones I started from seed in the garden, seem to be doing very well.

One of the other things I have done is move the battery bank out side and closer to the solar panels. I am trying to absorb every milli-amp of power I can get from the sun and one way to do that was shorten the cables from the panels to the batteries. It was also time to make a small shelter for the generator. The purpose of the shelter I made was also to shield the noise while it's running.

The video is just short clip of some of the clean up I have been working on around the property. You can never have too much firewood saved up. The trees I had taken down helped expose my solar panels to several more hours of sun and in turn reducing the time I need to run the generator.

With just 25 watts of solar panels and the amount of direct sun we are getting right now I am able to watch a DVD every night before going to bed.