On the Road

Mark Twain once said: “If the thermometer was an inch longer, we’d have froze to death.”  In November, we received 5 feet of snow and then the temperatures dropped to -4F for a week.  Actually, it was beautiful. Martina operates the camera as I slave away shoveling snow–that’s Petersburg in the distance–about 2 miles away.

We burned through a large bottle of propane every 3 days during the cold snap.  Most of all, it was hard on the animals.  We spotted a lynx and a wolf (on New Years day–year of the wolf?) and found a dead screech owl in our woodshed.  These owls have been hunting in the daytime which means they cannot find enough to eat at night.  During heavy snows, they lack the live mouse diet that is essential to life for them.  This bird was very emaciated.  We took the owl to town and it will be stuffed for exhibit at the Game and Fish office.  There is also a genetic study in Juneau that benefited from it’s demise–life continues on and we’ve observed more owls.

We’ll leave you with the below photo of the Narrows….our Blog has been broken for two months so we’ll post again in the next two weeks….”Doug’s Clubhouse.”      Stay tuned…..

First of all, it’s birthday time–the big one and I feel every year of 60–especially after all this masonry work!  We are lucky to share this event with friends we met in Antarctica, Mike and Jan Eviston.  Mike is an unusual guy who likes to work at 6am every morning.  Especially splitting wood!  Here’s Mike excelling at what he likes best:

Mike, you’re welcome anytime!  Martina and I have continued all winter to haul in wood.  Henry Thoreau was correct when he stated that “wood warms you twice.”  Maybe three or four times, I’d say….

Here we are cutting, splitting and hauling wood out of the forest–these are windblown trees that will provide us with heat for next year or perhaps the one after that–wood dries slowly in Alaska.  We felled a dead snag into our backchuck and it promptly sank!  Next, winter hits.  Stay tuned….