On the Road

Well, it’s a bit drab at times. Here’s a good shot of the Western Towboat’s “Pacific Titan” towing an AML barge past our house at about 8am. It’s getting lighter earlier now–we’re about a month past the winter solstice. I always keep an eye on these tows–making sure they turn properly or we would have a barge on our beach. These puppies are 80 feet wide and about 300 feet long–there are about 120 forty foot containers on board each rated at 80,000 lbs! This is the lifeline for all SE Alaska villages like Petersburg.

Kind of makes you want to take a sauna, so we fire up the stove (it’s Martina’s Birthday), get it good and hot and then take a peak…..yikes! That’s not steam, it’s smoke!

After we invest a fire extinguisher, and three or four buckets of water, the smoke clears:

Man, this was close! I’d better redesign the roof aperature–2″ clearance isn’t enough for this amount of heat. And if this isn’t enough, our skiff almost sinks when the plug falls out–man, it’s been a hectic week here in mid-January. Stay tuned….

One of our biggest interior projects was building a safe stairway to the second level–we’ve been using a rickety ladder for the past two years which dates to the 1960s. It finally broke with me on sitting on the top step and thanks to our cork floor, I’d be in the hospital. First, find a nice yellow cedar in your back yard and drag it out (two days–they’re heavy!) and peel it. Here we go:

This is the first step–pardon the pun. Designing a circular stairs about a log isn’t that bad; just tear up your plans and build it step at a time. Each of the eight steps gets 22.5 degrees and elevates 10-9/16″ which will take you 180 degrees and 95″ in height. Build a pattern with this angle and apply to each step.

Here we are half way; it took me about a week to complete everything averaging two steps a day. The problem was building in the woodbox (opening on right) and bench. Any changes required me to dismantle everything in reverse order; kind of like a Chinese puzzle or Rubic’s Cube.

Here’s the final product complete with a red cedar lid to keep the heat where it belongs and a bench matching our Tulikivi ‘hot seat.’ Now this is a set of stairs for a carpenter on the way up!

Latest Update!!! Walking out of the house this morning, we find these wolf tracks within 30 feet of our house; jumping over our new boardwalk–the nerve! Because of last year’s hard winter deer populations have plummeted and wolves have benefited. This year’s hungrier wolves now take risks by approaching beaches (and homesteads) where deer congregate during midwinter. We stalk the tracks from our saltchuck around the point where a chase between a deer and this wolf begin–very exciting! So we decide to investigate….

Sure enough…wolves chasing a deer.
We follow the prints to our upper property boundary (photo below) and discover an intersting fact. The wolf and deer do not follow the straight line boundary but follow our ski tracks which seek out the best route–which we’ve already pioneered.

Smart fellows except they’re not on nordic skis. Here is a wolf on the run–wide spaced and each rear paw follows in the front track for efficiency. The wolves are everywhere–we backtrack through our property (all ten acres) and find tracks all the way home. OK, it’s a nice workout and we walk out on our dock and take a quick snap of a beautiful January day

No more night-time walks to the netshed! Stay tuned….