More tree cutting

We had to cut down one of the biggest trees at our place today. It would have been hovering over our house had we left it and after growing up with giant trees hovering overhead, I decided to forgo the experience with our own house. It is a white spruce and measured out 107' tall with a 6'6" circumference at the base. That is a huge tree for the Fairbanks area by any standard. We'll be using it in the house in some way or another, but we haven't figured out quite how yet.
-Justin

Moose raided the chicken feed

Dogs were barking randomly tonight, and as I got up to see what was going on I noticed these guys out in the side yard between the porch and the outhouse.

They were munching on willow branches and we're looking pretty hungry. This time of year is hard on them as far as food goes, its getting pretty sparce. Then I look over at the chicken coop and notice that they have raided and completely eaten the chicken/rabbit food. We just bought a 50# bag yesterday. They knocked the container on the ground, broke the lid off and had proceeded to spread it all over the snow. When I walked over to check it out, the little guy decided he hadn't gotten enough earlier and came over to finish it off.

Moose out in the driveway

Heard some rumblings from outside and the dogs were acting a little weird, so I got up and looked out to the driveway. Cow and two calf moose were eating up our willows along the road. Just snapping off big sections of branch and chewing on them. I am just glad that I didn't let the dogs out to investigate before I noticed the moose.
I put some video up on youtube here.

Houseguest

Dad came up for some wintertime relaxation. We had a great time and really enjoyed his company. He stayed with us at the cabin all but one night. He appreciates the outhouse like no one else seems to.



Dad's last night at our cabin. 3 dogs and 3 people in a 16'x20'.

Some photos from the weekend

Got out to our property on Saturday, split and then stacked wood all day. Got some photos along the way though. It was nice and sunny out with some fresh snow. The weather was agreeable at about 13 above. It was nice to comfortably work without a jacket for a change.
-Justin


Chrissy hiking up the driveway, this is going to be interesting winter driving.


Split and stacked alot of wood. All birch in this pile.


Neat shadows in the snow from the bright sun. Looking South.


Fresh snow makes everything look so nice.

Warmed up tonight, walked the dogs

Chrissy got a teaching/subbing deal at a school near my work so we carpooled today. We got home and it had warmed up enough to take the dogs out on a bit of a walk. They have to get all bundled up though or else Gunnar and Squirrel get cold paws and start whining for home.
Snorri doesn't seem to mind much as long as she has a ball to chase/attack.
Not my most manly moment, but I sewed the one piece pajama like thing for Squirrel.
-28 F


Snorri trying to get Chrissy to kick the soccer ball, Squirrel just trying to stay upright.


Gunnar with a hostile ice beard and the look of "let me in the house already!"

effortlessly beautiful

A friend of ours is showing me how to make furniture out of birch. I haven't taken any photos yet of the process (next time- as I plan to make more), but I did feel compelled to take a photo of the wood shavings. They just looked so pretty laying in a pile on the floor. I'll take a photo of the small table I'm making when I'm finished. It' really awesome working with the wood. It's taught me a lot. It's very forgiving. There's also something about it that's..... seductive I guess you might say.
Chrissy

Cold starts, frozen everything and hard, slow work.

Its been cold lately. We're right in the midst of a "no end in sight" cold snap that has made everything outside a chore. Yesterday, Chrissy and I were itching to do some sort of physical work after being indoors in excess so we headed out to our property to split and stack some firewood. We brought along some cotton balls soaked with Vaseline so we could get an instant fire going as soon as we got there. It felt like it was probably in the -20 to -25 range out there which meant we had to keep starting up the truck every two hours or so since we don't have any electric yet. We got a good hot fire going and got to work. I was going to get some photos of the progress we made with the stacking, but the camera got too cold and couldn't muster up the power to turn on. I took a few photos when we first got there though..



Chrissy warming up by the burn barrel below the garage pad.



Looking South from below the garage pad. about 40 feet ahead is where we'll be building our house. Still need some site work on that portion.


Our garage pad, or part of it. Wood hauling sled in the foreground and one of the woodpiles we're in the process of moving in the background. We're thinking the garage is going to be 26' x 36' with two garage doors and a small shop on the end. We'll be living in this building for a bit while we build our house.


Our driveway looking North from the garage pad. I was standing just off to the left of the driveway which is why it looks like there is a log in the way. It meanders straight ahead and then takes a right up the hill pretty steep.
The birch tree laying out straight on the right is one we cut for Chrissy to use for some table legs. Shes been peeling logs at home lately.

We split wood for a while, which is really easy when its this cold. The logs just burst apart when the maul connects. Every bit of water in the wood is frozen and just waiting to fly apart. Then our friend Matt came up and we started the process of moving the previously seen woodpile over out of the way so we can start construction in its place in the spring.
Fortunately this will be the last time we need to move this wood before it takes a short trip to the stove. We still have 2 or 3 cords of wood that are cut into rounds and stacked that we'll try and split before the winters up as well as a fair amount of brush that we need to burn up while we have all this snow. The summertime wont allow any burning of brush and we don't want to just bury it.

Got up this morning and it was cold. -42 is what its reading at the house. We haven't even tried to start the truck, when its this cold it burns gas so fast and everything just feels like its about to break. We're just hanging out at home drinking coffee and watching videos.
The chicken coop has been holding out the cold pretty well. Our construction has proved effective. A week at -30 or colder was what I was fearing the most, but so far so good. We have 2 lights in there providing heat, a 250 watt infrared and an 80 watt red tint flood light. I had to wrap an old sleeping bag around the front door area of it to close up some of the small gaps, but other than that its been doing great.


The thermometer on the left the outside temperature. The one on the right is our wireless indoor and chicken coop thermometer. -43 outside, +40.8 in the coop.

New Years Moon with Venus

35 below at the house and I just got home from work. The moon has been looking pretty amazing these last few days with cold clear sky. Today though, ice fog has moved in. Not too bad at our house which is a little higher up, but really thick and gross in town. Just imagine all the exhaust, steam, smoke and dust all swirling around between ground level and 50 feet up, as a nice fine particulate freezy mist.
Tried out my new camera from the driveway. Heres what the crescent Moon and Venus looked like at 4:45 pm. The blobs are particles from the ice fog that reflected the flash.

3 dogs in a cold cabin.

Squirrel, Gunnar and Snorri (fatty)

Heat wave

Ice fishing without a proper hut... not so good.

A couple of Sundays ago we went ice fishing with a couple of friends. We drove about 40 miles out Chena Hot Springs Rd to a pond not too far from the springs- which was the real motivator upon my agreeing to partake in the excursion. A nice soak in piping hot water sounded like a decent trade off for spending a few hours on the ice. I think it was only hovering around zero that day, but the wind coming off the hills was wretched. April and I built a fire on the pond with some wood we pulled out of the nearby trees. It didn't do too much to help keep warm because the heat was blowing away from us. The act of hauling the wood out was doing a better job at that than the fire itself. Honestly, I think I was the only one not having a good time. I stuck it out as long as I could and finally admitted that I thought the whole thing was bullshit. They all had a good laugh and we packed up our stuff and left. For me it was a lesson learned. I will try ice fishing again, but it's going to be in hut where there's no wind.
oh yeah... I forgot to mention that we only caught one fish and it was about 4 inches long.
Chrissy

some Halloween photos of the dogs that I haven't had a chance to put up

These are some photos that Mandy took. She also made the adorable costumes. Squirrel is the littlest one.

Its cold today

Ptarmigan hunting and scouting for Caribou

From last weekend, skied in, hiked up, up and up, got a few ptarmigan, spotted a good size moose and then two caribou hanging out on a mountainside.

Some more photos from Burbot fishing back at the beginning of October

Chrissy on the Tanana River


Some older wolf tracks on the river bank, pretty big ones.


Some of the delicious burbot.




All of these photos are courtesy of Mandy R

Deep Freeze

Its been a cold October this year. Uncharacteristically cold for this early in the winter. Someone even told me that it was a record this year for the coldest October.   

We haven't posted much lately because we haven't spent very much time at home. We've been busy with splitting firewood for next year, clearing brush from the land and having massive bonfires with it. Skiing will be good soon, as we just got some more snow and it seems that most of the trail systems nearby have been groomed to some degree. A little more snow and we'll be in great shape.  This morning it was a bitter 12 below when I got up to let the dogs pee and check on the chickens. We're dogsitting for a lady I work with so we currently have 4 in the cabin. That's a tight squeeze with 480 sq. feet of living space, 1/4 of which is taken up by a bed.  Our chickens have been belting out eggs at a rate of 4 a day. I am pretty impressed with their ability to stay warm. We put a 250 watt infrared heat lamp in the coop to keep them toasty and that's helped them out quite a bit. 

Most people that I've talked with about chickens up here lock them up in a closed space for the winter and use a light to keep them warm. Chrissy and I couldn't handle that so we put a few towels over the doorway to the coop and cut them into overlapping strips so they hang down like the door to a walk in freezer. This seems to be keeping in the right amount of heat and keeping out cabin fever for the chickens. It took a day or so for them to figure out what a door was and how it works, but they managed to get it.

We still have our rabbit and hes started pulling his own weight a little. When I go out to check on the chickens in the morning, at least 3 of them are almost always huddled around the rabbit. This thing throws off heat like you couldn't imagine, hes got a huge ring of fat around his neck and can barely stand to be inside the chicken coop, but when he is... They all hover around, soaking up the heat loss. 

I've been trying to get Chrissy to put up some photos of our newest dog Squirrel on here without any luck so far. After seeing this though, she might get motivated to do so. Squirrel is a little damien shia tzu that terrorizes Gunnar and Snorri, in a good way. She keeps everyone on their toes. She sort of found us a few months ago when Chrissy was still working at the greenhouse. An employee showed up with her and said she was following her husband home on his motorcycle, looking lonely and dejected with only a cheapy flea collar on. Chrissy obliged to take her home and put up flyers. We took her home, put up flyers, never heard anything and kept her.  When you can see photos of her, you'll understand why we did. She has this pathetic loneliness about her that is pretty irresistible. 

I'm headed up the Steese Highway this weekend to do some scouting for caribou with a friend. We cant hunt for another month or so, but wanted to get a headstart on things and ski around a bit. Plenty of snow up there for good skiing and we can do some ptarmigan hunting while we're out too. We saw lots of tracks when we went up last weekend with boots only, but its just too much work to hike very far when you have a foot of snow on the ground. Skis will make for a much better time this weekend.

Hopefully the temperature stays tolerable, since I have waxless nordic skis, they quit being very functional down around 10 below. They just get slick and don't get any bite on the snow to get you up hills. 

Thats about it for updates right now, I'm sure I can think of more to write a little bit later.

4 above at work - Justin

Burbot fishing

We went burbot fishing this weekend with bank sets on the Tanana river, all day saturday putting out sets and then most of the day sunday hauling in fish. End of the day we had 10 good size burbot, with the largest being 24". 

It was pretty chilly when we went to pull the sets, got about 4" of snow on the ground and it was blowing hard along the river.

Fishing for Burbot