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.

Wild fires everywhere!!

Yikes, fires are burning all around Doug and I. After several days of fire crews battling many different fires it seems most of them are under control. The fire that was burning closest to the lake cabin was up on the ridge to the north of the cabin. I met quite a few fire crew guys that were working on cleaning up around the other cabin on the lake. They were also setting up a water pump plumbed from the lake up to that cabin. They were a little more concerned about the other cabin off the lake because it is a little further up the hill side making it closer to the fire. They did ask if I wanted any work done around the property but we determined it looked pretty good and if the fire made it this far down the hill it wouldn't have a lot to burn.

As it turns out some cabins up river have not been so lucky. A cabin in between Ralf and Bill's cabin's burned to the ground. One of Ralf's cabins had some fire damage but nothing major. The fire crews were able to get it out before any of Ralf's burned down. The pics above are of the fire growing over the ridge coming from Ralf and Bill's headed toward Doug's cabin on the hill side. Since I took the photos they seemed to have that fire under control. Right now I think the only one they are fighting out here right now is many miles up stream somewhere past Ralf's place.

No bears yet, but...

I woke up the other morning, looked out the window and there staring back at me was a big fat porcupine! I'm glad I spotted it before I let Sammy out, I don't feel like pulling quills out of her again. Where the porcupine was in the yard was well out of reach from Sammy while she is chained up and I was able to get the chain on her before I let her out of the cabin. I think she remembered what those quills felt from the last time, because she didn't seem to want to have anything to do with it when she got outside.

I couldn't seem to do anything to scare it off until I split a little firewood around the back side of the cabin. And then it only went down the hill about 20 feet and hid under a spruce tree I cut down this spring. It spent the whole day and late into the evening just down the hill between the cabin and the lake.

When I finally went to bed it was still down by the lake milling around one of the beaver lodges. The next morning I did a quick survey around the yard before I let Sammy out and didn't see it anywhere around the cabin. I went up to Doug's cabin later in the day and made sure Sammy was right on my hip the whole time just in case it was still hanging around.

In other news it's been very hot and dry lately and wild fires are popping up everywhere. Right now airplanes are fighting one somewhere over the ridge to the east of Doug's. Fortunately the wind is working in our favor right now and blowing it away from us.

The first couple pics are of the porcupine in the front yard right next to my scrap lumber pile. And the other shows how hot it's been lately. It was taken about 12:30 pm a couple days ago while the thermometer was still in the shade.

Busy as a Beaver

Looks like I'm not the only one at the lake getting some work done. I spotted a beaver in the slough a while ago and was able to snap a pic of it. As of this morning it is still hanging around so I'd assume that it has taken up residence in one of the old beaver lodges on the lake.

After getting the cabin and yard cleaned up I started right in on putting in a garden. There was a spot at near the cabin where a garden once was but hasn't been used for well over a decade. The soil was mostly all compacted silt which unfortunately won't support much plan growth. So my plan was to trench out rows into the rock and silt and manufacture my own soil and replace it in the trenches.

To make plantable soil I had to dig up some tundra down to where the silt and rock layer began, about 6 inches deep, sift through the tundra, add some sand hauled from the river and throw in some old stove ashes. It would take about 2 to 3 days digging, hauling and sifting to make enough dirt for a 12 inch wide by 8 foot long row.

This has been an ongoing project for almost two weeks but I'm coming to the end for this season. According to Doug anything that I want to plant needs be be in by the end of this weekend to have a harvest in the fall.

The photos after the pic of the beaver are the progression of the garden. It's not much of a garden but I hope I can get some good veggies out of it.

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.