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.