I get by with a little help from my friends. East Pole Journal V.II Ep. 14

My yard's a mess during wood gathering season.

Some years ago my friend Joe May sent me a gadget that measures the amount of moisture in wood. You can tell if your firewood is dry enough to burn, at least that’s how I figured it. As a result it sat unused for much of the year, often forgotten, at least until today.     In my waking thought process today I decided to stick it out here as long as I can rather than run at the first sign of anything resembling the big thaw we call breakup. I am behind on firewood. At this point I’m about half a cord short. I have enough on the ground but there’s a lot of hauling and splitting and stacking to be done. On top of that, after the miserable January and February I spent out here I figure Nature owes me a few extra days.

     To confirm my resolve I heard a weather show on the radio where some expert says we are going through a March when the temperature never went above freezing, we have a deep compacted snow pack and it looks like winter will stretch on into April. So, I’m staying.

     One problem. I am running out of the seasoned birch firewood I cut last year. I have enough to just about make it to the end of March, which was all I planned for. What I’ve been cutting this year ain’t going to burn yet so I needed to take down one of the beetle-killed spruce around here. They are usually dry enough to give an adequate burn.

     I had picked out two that looked good but how do you choose? Wait, hey, let’s see which one is drier. And there comes Joe May’s General MMD4E Moisture gauge. So with the instrument in hand I headed for the first tree, slogging through thigh deep soft snow until I reach it to push in the probes. 20.56% moisture. Even a neophyte like me knows that’s not good. Too bad, that one was closer to the house and near one of the trails I’d made for hauling the wood up from the two birches I have been working on. More slogging through deep snow. I am not sure which spruce species I am looking at. The first one has a tight bark pattern and yellowish wood while the other has a ragged bark pattern and whitish wood. After another 100 feet of slogging, I jammed the probes into the second tree. First reading 16.4%, but a couple of other spots showed between 11% and 13%. That falls into the medium range and is probably burnable.

    Then I saw where another friend had helped. The song’s line and the headline say friends (plural). I’ve written about all the moose trails around here in the past week or so and look at this: there’s a moose trail that passes near the tree and continues on to my main uphill trail. That means pretty easy hauling once I get the moose trail packed down a little more.

Next step grab a chainsaw and within less than an hour I had the tree down and sections cut about halfway along the trunk. I pulled a couple of them up the trail in the sled and split them and some are burning in the stove right now. After nearly tearing my arms out of their sockets mangling birch, splitting light spruce is delightful, even fun. That whole process of felling the tree cutting up the trunk, hauling a couple pieces uphill and splitting them took less than an hour all told. And, that was on top of my normal hours put in handling the birch. 

     Like I said I get by with a little help from my friends. So, thank you Joe May and thank you anonymous moose. You made my day and take the pressure off so staying here a little longer than usual. And, there should be enough firewood in that spruce I took down to keep me warm this year with a lot left over for next year.  Winner, winner, wish I had some chicken for dinner. 

ADDENDUM: 

Treating wood for moisture

Upon awakening the next morning my wandering mind produced another epiphany regarding moisture content in wood. I have bragged for years how the March sun lights up my deck for four or five hours every afternoon sending the temperature in a thermometer that gets the full force of that sunlight into the stratosphere as high as 70 degrees or more. Why not, I thought, lay out a bunch of this new spruce I have cut on the deck and let the sun suck the moisture out of it. So, I cut and split some and laid it out. At the start a little after noon, I checked moisture in two chunks with my Joe May approved General™MMD4E moisture gauge. One chunk from the center of a larger piece read 18.9% moisture. The other, taken closer to the outer edge just under the bark read 15.9%. Sixteen percent is the breaking point between high and medium ranges on the meter. A couple of hours of overcast shortened the direct sunlight period, however when I checked them at 9 p.m., the deep wood read 17.6 on the gauge, a drop of more than 1%. The other showed a similar drop at 14.7%, more than 1%. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is a gain, making the wood more burnable. I have two or three weeks in that sunshine so I am going to leave it out in the sun and add to it. Now if I only had something that measures BTUs. Day by day drying progress: % moisture content

Start     Center     Outer rim

Begin     18.9%     15.9%

Day 1     17.6%     14.7% (Haze for part of day)

Day 2     15.8%     13.4% (Full sun)

Day 3     14.3%      9.2% (Full sun) 

Day 4     11.45%     7.45%  (Hazy all day)

Day 5     15.2%      15.9& (Full 12 hours plus snowing)    

 

AND: Here’s that “but.” I have been testing at the ends of the pieces to get the recorded numbers. Just as a “what if” tonight I tested in the middle of the chunk, the lengthwise middle.

No numbers even close to ”medium.” Synopsis: The sun has a noticeable effect, but it’s not as universally strong as first indicated. All the readings were between 17 and 20 percent, too moist to be effective fuel, But, yes, there’s another one. I learned how to burn it. By itself in the stove it tended to smolder and eventually go out. However if I get a good fire going at first, using the last of the precious birch from last year, and then built up a bed of coals and kept the fire blazing, it burned fine. It takes more tending to keep it going, but I have lots of that wood. Only one problem; it was 90 degrees in here last night when I went to bed.

East Pole Journal

East Pole Journal V. II, Ep. 13: Thirsty birds, daylight savings, equinox

Room for a few more. I've seen
three on that icicle.

The sun rose over the highest point on the North Ridge this morning, lighting up the yard

and starting the melting process on the chickadee watering icicles. They’ve been going at it for about a week now and I’ve seen as many as three at a time on the longest one. I watched a redpoll try it but he couldn’t get a grip and slid down it until he gave up and flew away. Entertaining stuff for sure. I find myself often having stopped what I was doing and staring at the bird shenanigans. Three pine grosbeaks, a male and two females, have showed up almost every day over the past two weeks.

I have a new reason to gripe about daylight savings time also. To begin with the old gripe involves the political change of time zone in Alaska to bring us within only one hour of the West Coast. It used to be two. Then you pile another hour on for daylight savings and now our solar noon is around 2 p.m. two hours late. Of course you can sleep in until 10 and wake up knowing it’s really 8. That never had much of an effect on me except the irritation. But this year something changed. I have read about being in tune with nature and how seasons and climate affect wildlife behavior. Last Sunday I noticed a difference. For one, I slept later than usual. When I did get up it was darker than I had been used to. A gray sky dimmed everything anyway, but this was different. Things I could easily see at this time the previous day, I needed a flashlight to see Sunday morning. All day I felt a little bit off, like lethargic. The temperature’s been down near zero mornings for the past couple of weeks. As a result I have found things to do indoors until it warmed up around noon and I felt better about going outdoors and working on the wood pile. Not so, Sunday. I kept finding lame excuses for not going out to work,

What are you looking at?

little chores I had been neglecting, small indoor projects or just flopping on the bed with my eyes closed. Finally around 4, I went out to get wood and water, and forced myself to split at least one sled load of wood for next year. That lasted a whole hour until dinner time and that was the whole effort for the day. It only dawned on me a couple of days later that I had been so in tune with the sunlight that the hour change had disrupted my rhythm and threw me off for a day. Monday was a disrupted day anyway with a 150-mile journey to Wasilla and by Tuesday I had adjusted.  I still don’t like the loss of light in the morning though.

As I’ve said in other posts, there’s a story about a Native American chief who said about daylight savings: “Only the white man would cut off the end of a blanket, sew it onto the other end and think he had a longer blanket.”

And then there’s the equinox coming up this weekend. It crossed my mind for no particular reason that is my 155^th equinox, 115^th in Alaska.

 

East Pole Journal

 

East Pole Journal V. II, No. 12: Now the moose are just messin’ with me

This is the trail at the bottom of the hill below the cabin.

A few days ago I wrote about tracks showing two moose had come uphill fairly close to the
house. Their tracks joined near a clump of large birch about 15 feet or so from the deck and then showed both moose had meandered on up the hill.

So, the next day I saw where a moose came back down the hill passing close to the house on the north side of the trees and heading down the hill.

The next day not until late afternoon I noticed where two moose again had come up the hill but this time one of them did some digging around by the trees and may even have laid down there for a time.

Now, this didn’t happen at night, but right under my nose sometime during the day. I know all that wasn’t there in the morning because I had spent two hours on that side of the roof shoveling snow. After that, lunch and a brief rest summoned me indoors. Around 1 or so I went back out and headed up the hill to split some more of that tree I had down for firewood. The tracks could have been there at that time; I can’t be sure because I don’t recall looking that way. But I did see moose tracks coming up through the brushy top of twigs from the tree, passing the outhouse on the trail I had made for pulling sleds full of firewood and heading again downhill. That one left four huge, hoof punctures in the trail right by the doorway to the outhouse. The tracks had become so confusing I wasn’t sure which trail led where. Then, as pointed out, I noticed the mysterious digging and again a trail heading up the hill.

The next morning, I saw where a moose had come downhill again and passed close enough to almost touch the end of the deck on the south side of the house, then down my main trail punching holes in it as he went.

Then next day, when I went out in the morning, I spied another set of tracks, these traversing the hillside above the cabin from west to east and continuing on to the next cabin.

This all resulted in a maze of moose tracks all over the hill up, down trails, dug a hole, a traverse and maybe even a bed. 

All that broken snow appears to be a moose bed near the cabin.

Today another new track went in sometime between when I woke up and 3:30 p.m. This one looks like it goes from east to west traversing the hill below the cabin until it comes out on my snowmachine trail down there. It wasn’t there when I looked out this morning. Also in late afternoon when the low-angled winter sunlight lit up the upper hillside, I spotted another moose bed, this one much larger maybe 200 feet from the cabin.

What it’s looking like is going out for my morning paper on the porch; where have the moose been and where are they going? Is it a game of let’s see how close we can get to him without being spotted?  Or, as I suspect, are they just messing with my head?

Strange things can be seen when alone in the deep woods and the mind doesn’t always have the clarity to interpret them without a little perspective and that perspective isn’t always forthcoming easily when reality plays tricks with fantasy and all of a sudden moose are plotting against you. Like, maybe they think this hill is theirs and it’s about time this interloper moves along.

East Pole Journal