Doug has returned

About 10 days ago Doug returned to Fairbanks after traveling to southeast Asia and visiting his mother and friends in the lower 48. I continued to stay at his cabin for about a week to help him get back in the groove of the bush life. As of now I have moved back down to the lake cabin and will stay there for couple weeks. On April 5th I will be catching a flight back to Minnesota to visit for a few weeks and return in time to catch the beginning of summer.

While I stay at the lake I will be spending a lot of time cutting trees around the cabin and on the perimeter of the lake. Most of the trees I will be taking down are about to fall into the lake or are leaning very badly. There are also handful of trees that need to come down to allow more sunshine to hit my solar panels throughout the day.

When I return from Minnesota I am planning on getting a job in town or in the surrounding area and am hoping to spend the weekends out on the Chatanika. I do plan on purchasing the lake cabin from Doug and there is a lot of work I plan on doing to the cabin and property.

With the intention of doing a lot of building and tree cutting I decided I should get my own chainsaw. In the picture above I am holding my new pride and joy, a Stihl MS 362. It's a pro grade saw and is the same saw the forest service and fire crews use. The 362 is a step up from the Husqvarna saws I had been using the past year. I wanted a little more power and low end torque, but that came at a price. The saw is a little bigger and heavier than Doug's saws and cost me over $700! I am hoping that it will be a one time purchase and will last the rest of my life.

Well, I'm off to tear down my generator, since the pull start destroyed itself last night, and hope to get something rigged so I don't have to rely 100% on my little solar setup.

Work with a little play

I have decided not to post the Aurora pics due to their poor quality and instead move on to some of the other things I have been doing lately.

Since the weather has been warmer I decided to take a break from wood cutting, something I'd been doing about every other day and put the snowmachine to use hauling something else. That being a trail groomer. My friend Bill, that helped me out when the snowmachine broke down, has had a groomer that he made stored over at Ralf's cabin that was begging for some use.

The trail up to Murphy Dome had not been in the best shape after extreme winds and snow fall came just after my return from getting the snowmachine carburetor repaired. After being up and down the hill earlier this winter on a "smooth as glass" trail I knew something had to be done.

Several times in the last two weeks I have taken the snowmachine over to Ralf's cabin, picked up the trail groomer and hit the trail. My route took me from Ralf's cabin, up the Blueberry trail to where it intersects with 7 mile and then up to the Dome. After reaching the trail head at Murphy Dome I would head back down the trail, taking 7 mile instead of the Blueberry trail where they meet, get to the river, then pull the groomer upstream the few miles and store the groomer back at Ralf's.

The trail is MUCH better than it was but it still needs a lot of work. Unfortunately Bill wanted the groomer back, to smooth out some trails closer to town, so I had to give my new favorite toy back, for now...

The first pic was taken going up the Blueberry trail pulling the groomer during a rest stop. The rest was not for me but for the machine. With the warmer temps, above zero, pulling the groomer up hill puts a lot of strain on the machine and doing all I can to keep it cool, it still will over heat.

One of the other projects I tackled this week was cleaning out the stove pipe for the big wood stove(the main cabin heat). I did not have too much fun doing this job but it really needed to be done.

The stove had not been burning the way it should for a while and I could see some creosote residue running down the outside of the stove pipe coming out of the cabin. This lead me to believe that there was some build up inside of the pipe limiting the draw from the wood stove.

Since the stove pipe extends so far from the the top of the roof I had remove the pipe from the wood stove and work my way up. Whew, what a messy job! I got most of the build up out using a couple sticks screwed together with a small coffee can at the end, plunging it up and down freeing up the creosote so it fell down into a bucket I had placed under the pipe. That worked for most of the pipe but then the coffee can got stuck way up in the pipe and I had to get on the roof and remove some sections of pipe to get it free. I wanted to avoid taking the top sections of pipe off because it involved leaning a 6 foot ladder against the pipe, standing on top of the ladder and somehow pulling the pipe apart without falling off the roof. But I ended up having to do that anyway. Luckily my plunging with the coffee can loosened up the top part of the pipe a bit and I was able to yank it out, drop it down to the snow covered roof without damage and get off the roof in one piece. I say drop it down because the 5 feet of pipe I pulled out must have weighed 40 lbs! The 6 inch diameter pipe was now narrowed down to about an inch and a half with all of the build up inside!

I'm glad I cleaned out to stove pipe when I did and also am very fortunate that I didn't have a fire in the pipe itself.

The other two pics are of the aftermath of the pipe cleaning. The pic of the stove is after I swept up a little. The bucket on top of the stove is almost full of what came down the pipe during cleaning. The other pic was taken in the front yard where I cleaned out the top two sections of pipe.

In total I think I scrubbed about 7 gallons of creosote out of the stove pipe and I will be consulting with Doug when he gets back on how to avoid this in the future.

Moose hanging around Doug's

Here are a few pics of the moose that has been hanging around the cabin. The first two I took just after getting out of bed in the morning, on my way out to start the generator. Luckily I spotted the moose before the dogs did so I was able to keep them from running up the hill after it. I had been up that part of the hill previously looking for firewood and had seen several spots where it had been bedding down along the ridge-line. The third pic was taken right out the atrium door at about one o'clock in the morning. I had been up late reading in bed and just as I was turning out the light Aggie, who was laying on the floor next to the bed, started woofing. She made her way down stairs and kept barking but I turned off the light and hoped whatever it was would just pass through. After a few minutes Aggie was still barking so i figured I better see what's going on. With flashlight in hand I went down stairs and looked out the living room window, didn't see anything, walked towards the atrium and looking back at me right next to the window was a big moose! I went right for my camera and by the time I had it the moose had walked a little further into the front yard. I opened the atrium door as quietly as I could, reached around the corner and snapped the pic you see. Right after I took the picture the moose proceeded to munch on some of Doug's favorite trees so I ended up clapping my hands and yelling until it slowly made it's way out of the yard. With the warmer weather we are having I probably won't see it up here again, but that was pretty cool having it stay right around the cabin for a couple weeks.

Last night there was a spectacular northern lights show and I made an attempt at getting some pictures of it. Unfortunately the moon was out at the same time messing up my exposure so the pics didn't turn out that good. I'll sort through the photos I shot and see if I can find a few that are worthy to show you.

Troubles over, back on track

Whew, what a winter! Shorty after my last post things started to go wrong. The first issue I had was with the generator. It started running really poorly and I tried to trouble shoot it but couldn't find the problem. No big deal I figured, I'll just fire up the back-up. I swapped out the generator, started it up, it ran good so I made my way back into the cabin. About an hour later I looked out the window and saw smoke pouring out of the generator building! After throwing on some clothes as fast as I could I ran out and into the building to see what the problem was. The generator was pouring out oil from somewhere on top of the engine where I couldn't see. This was a major disappointment being that we had that generator in town this summer to repair that exact issue. I was now down to my last option, the BIG generator. I got that one gassed up and started and it didn't seem to be running very good. Not only was it not running well but that generator is fairly large and uses a lot fuel, so I also was concerned about using up all my fuel. Eventually this lead me to dig further into the original generator because I figured running the big generator was not an option. After a couple days I did finally find the problem, a clogged fuel line, and got back to par as far as power goes.

During the troubles with the generators the snowmachine started to develop an issue as well. After days and days of working on the machine, sometimes taking up to 2 hours to get it started, the problem got so bad I couldn't use it at all. This meant I was left to hauling firewood to the cabin on my back! I spent a couple days snowshoeing around the cabin trying to find some standing dead and finally came across a good stand of timber I could burn. Unfortunately to get to it, would not be easy. It was located in the creek valley to the west of the cabin and the trail in and out of there was only about a foot wide. This was because it traversed the hill side and eventually switch backed down to the valley. Since the trail was so narrow, using a sled was not possible, so I had to hike down to the lake cabin and pick up the pack board I used to haul water buckets with during the summer. I would not recommend hauling wood this way, man it's tough and very hard on your back! It would take me a few hours of cutting and hauling just to get one days worth of firewood. By the end of the day I was exhausted and couldn't bring myself to put up a new post on the blog, this was the main reason for the lapse in the blog.

After almost two weeks of hauling wood this way and continuing to trouble shoot the snowmachine, I finally narrowed down the problem with the machine, something wrong on the inside of one of the carburetors. At this point I had been in contact with my friends Ralf and Bill in town and got a plan together to solve my snowmachine issue. I had to wait for some good weather and then I would hike out with the carburetor from the machine, get it to town and then borrow one of Bill's machines until it was repaired.

I had hiked in and out before but this trip was nothing short of epic! The hike out took about 5 hours, 2 hours longer than usual, because I was pulling a very large sled meant for a snowmachine. I figured since I was going to town I might as well pick up a few things. I eventually met up with Bill and we got the carburetor to a tech in town that had it fixed up that afternoon! After taking care of business in town I got back up to the Dome, with Bill's machine and prepared for the ride back out to Doug's. At this point it was already dark and I was very tired and just wanted to get home. Unfortunately the trail and the snowmachine had another idea. At two different places coming down the hill I slid off the packed trail just enough to fall into a snow abyss about 4 to 5 feet deep! Just what I needed more work! I did finally get myself out both times but I didn't arrive back at the cabin until 10 pm. That made for a 13 hour day and I was more than spent. As soon as I pulled into the yard and shut down the machine a blizzard hit, boy was I lucky.

Since then I've got Doug's machine back together, repairing some other problems as well and returned Bill's machine. Wow, February was a tough month and it took quite a fight get through it.

Unfortunately I didn't use my camera very much during those difficult times but that will change. I did snap a pic of a three and a half foot chunk of wood strapped to my back while the snowmachine was broke down. And coming up in the next post I have some video and photos of a moose that has been hanging around the cabin.