Hiked out to the Lake cabin

To follow up on the last post, Ken and I did end up finding a little gold but it wasn't enough to get really excited about. Since then we have traveled farther and farther up the Steese highway, that parallels the Chatanika river, looking for un-claimed creek beds to dig into. A lot of the spots we wanted to go were not quite thawed out from winter yet or were already staked mining claims.

I had really been itching to get out to the Lake cabin on the Chatanika. Doing some gold prospecting with Ken was a great way to kill some time waiting for the trail and river to become passable. On Friday the 13th I decided to take a chance and hike out to the cabin. The hike in was actually quite nice and crossing the river was not too bad either. I didn't get in touch with Doug, to let him know I was coming out, so I had to wade across the river instead of using a canoe. I figured I was going to have to walk across the river so I brought an extra pair of shorts and shoes. The water was cold, really cold, but the crossing went without incident. When I approached Doug's place the geese started making quite a lot of noise so Doug came outside and was quite surprised to see me walking up the hill.

I was so happy to be re-connected with Sammy and I think the feeling was mutual. Since I have arrived back at the lake cabin I have been hard at work doing some spring cleaning and am also working on putting in a garden!

The weather has been nothing short of spectacular since I've been out here so lots of work is getting done. Unfortunately I will not be out here to long because I have to head back to town to start a summer job. My plan this summer is to still spend as much time out here as I can when I am not working. Since I have decided to start a garden I'm sure that will need a lot of attention.

I have a pic from one of the days Ken and I were 8o miles up the Steese highway, digging into the Chatanika river shortly down stream from where it begins. The weather turned sour on us all of a sudden and started dumping quarter sized snow flakes! Before we knew it there was a couple inches of fresh snow on the ground. You will have to look really hard to see Ken digging in the river in the center of the picture. I'm not sure if that material had any gold in it because right after we brought back what we had run through a sluice box I took off for Doug's and the lake cabin.

I have some pics of all the work it takes to put in a garden out here and also a few pics of a new lake resident! Those things coming up next.

Back in Fairbanks, a new adventure begins

Ahh, home again. After being back in Fairbanks just a few days I have met a new friend that drove all the way here from New Hampshire! His name is Ken and he is here not only for a job but is also hoping to make some money doing some gold prospecting.

I was hoping when I got back to Fairbanks that I would be able to catch a ride up to Murphy Dome and then hike down to the Chatanika. But it sounds like the river is still flooded and that there is still a good amount of snow on the north slope of the trail. I hiked out there last spring in these same conditions and a trip that should take 2 1/2 hours took 6 hours! I figured it would be a good idea just to wait and in the mean time I could work on getting a job in town for the summer.

As usual I am staying in a tent at Billie's hostel while in town to save as much money as possible. While hanging out in the common area of the hostel Ken and I struck up a conversation and eventually he needed some help getting his GPS to communicate with his computer. That turned out to be a great "ice breaker," and later that morning he asked if I wanted to go for a ride to scout out some potential gold prospecting spots.

We eventually ended up about 50 miles north east of Fairbanks on a minimum maintenance road that had a creek running across it. Ken thought that the creek would make a great spot for a sluice box and all we needed was some dirt to run through it. So we picked a hill side near by and started filling some buckets. After running a few buckets through the sluice we took what was left in the box and made our way back toward Fairbanks. We needed to find some calmer water to pan out what had been left in the sluice box.

All along the highway, we had taken out of Fairbanks, piles upon piles of old material that had been processed by miners years ago cover the landscape. About 15 miles outside of Fairbanks there is a spot to pull off the road into an area that is a old gold claim from 1902. There you are welcome to pan for gold all you like but can't camp over night. Ken had stopped at this spot the previous day and did find a few flakes of gold, panning out some material from an old tailing pile(tailing pile is what is left after being processed for gold).

This was a good spot to pan through our material left from sluicing up the road. Before we new it it was 9pm and we were both pretty tired. We didn't quite make it through all of the material but figured we could pan out the rest somewhere in town the next day.

Ken did find a tiny flake of gold, but for 3-5 gallon buckets that's not a very good ratio. So our plan for the next day was to head back to that old claim just out side of town and dig a little deeper into one of the tailing piles. I should mention that the 3 buckets I spoke of were run through the sluice box and what was left was only about an inch thick in the bottom of 1 bucket. Just that little bit still took the two of us several hours to pan through!

The old mining claim that they allow you to pan for gold doesn't want you to use any "mechanical assistance," like sluice boxes or dredges so we came up with a plan to work our way around that. While filling our buckets we used a classifier, which is just a fancy name for a screen, to filter out all of the big rocks leaving us with only quarter inch and smaller material. Any gold that is larger than that has probably already been cleaned out from the mine in the past.

When we had our buckets filled with nice fine material we loaded up Ken's truck and made our way up the road to a different location to run it through the sluice box. Ken has a pair of sluice boxes so we both took a bucket and spent several hours filtering down our potential gold bearing dirt. Setting up a sluice box is quite tedious and I think it took longer to get it set right than to run all of the dirt through it. Ken is a great teacher and has made this new learning experience a lot of fun.

After getting all of our material run through the sluice boxes it was approaching 9pm again and was time to head home. We are only getting a few hours of darkness right now and it is getting hard to tell what time it is later in the day.

The pics are of Ken and I in the Chatanika river, many many many miles up stream from the lake cabin, running our buckets of dirt through the sluice boxes.

Today we'll head to out to our little panning spot in town and take down the material from yesterday and hopefully score a little gold.

Putting new saw to use

Since moving back down to the lake cabin I have been putting that new chainsaw to good use. First off I have started to stock pile a good amount of firewood for next winter as you can see by the first photo. I cut the chunks of wood into chainsaw lengths, making some of the larger diameter ones as much as I can lift by myself. I will cut them down to stove length and split them at a later date.

Next, I also have been cutting some wood for the saw mill. The woods off the lake shore is not very accessible by four wheeler during the summer months so I have been trying to get as much wood from that area while I can. The next photo shows a pile of logs pulled to the mill by dragging them, chained to a sled, with the snowmachine. The logs are 9 to 12 foot lengths and hopefully with be a good start to a stock of lumber for construction at the lake cabin this summer.

The last photo was taken back in the woods off the lake, a place I liked to call my candy store because of all the trees that need to be cut down in that area. The trees that I'm talking about are very large and are leaning so bad that they will eventually pull themselves out of the ground. This is due to the melting perma-frost under the root system. By removing all of the leaning spruce trees Doug and I are hoping the birch tree populating will take off and draw beavers back to the lake. The pic shows the snowmachine and two trailers loaded full of wood to be taken back to the cabin.

Along with gathering firewood for the cabin and getting logs to the mill I also spend part of the day hauling firewood up to Doug's and splitting it for him. The plan is to get him enough wood to last the rest of spring so he won't have to stain himself with that type of work, allowing his back to heal from surgery he had while he was traveling.

All of that work makes for a pretty long and hard work day and I am looking forward to the 3 week vacation in Minnesota coming up in a few days. That being said this will most likely be the last post I put up until I return from my trip, at the end of this month.

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.