Monday May (not sure of the date) 17?… We don’t have either radio or television reception out here, a reminder this is frontier. We ran out of propane in one tank during the night, and woke up cold about 6 AM. The clear dry weather and brilliant blue sky of Sunday translated into less humidity to hold the night temp up, and when Paulette went to take a shower in the morning we realized the 100 foot water hose from the house had frozen again. So much for a shower. That was a freak surprise as days are getting longer and longer. Darkness arrives about 10:30 PM and it starts getting light again about 4 AM. We have tin foil on the bedroom windows to help simulate darkness for sleep. If my 62 year old body would cooperate (it doesn’t) we have a lot of daylight in which to work.
We work ourselves hard. Today I would fell, cut into pieces, and stack and load the firewood while Paulette picked up and piled slash. If one of us gets ahead of the other we shift over to help. We now have five jumbo piles of slash to burn. Several stacks are 9-10 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Paulette packed a lunch so we sat on our promontory overlooking the river and ate. She commented, “First meal on our property.”A few bugs showed up today in the warm mid-sixty’s temps. Mostly mosquitoes and a few flies. We hardly noticed them until we would took a break. Then they would locate us as a stationary target. I have not counted but suspect we have dropped and swamped (a logging term for cleaning up brush) about sixty-five trees. Only a bit over a dozen more big ones to go. Some days if we are dealing with monster trees (70-80 feet tall) we can only do three in a day. Today we did mostly smaller stuff, 5-9 inches in diameter and 30 to 40 feet tall. They have less slash than the big sentinels so we conquer 7-8 a day. Either way we are beat at the end of the day and sleep well. We both feel this may be the hardest work we have ever done in our lives. We only have 2-3 more days of this... but three of the biggest trees yet to deal with. I am not looking forward to felling one of them as it is hard to detect any lean. The other two will be easier… I hope. (They don’t call them “widow-makers” for nothing.) A twelve inch fifty footer we did today started to go the wrong way and Paulette and I both put our backs into it to try to redirect the fall while it was still almost vertical. Amazingly, after several tries it did a partial pirouette and went where we wanted. I promised Paulette I would not do any of the monsters when I am alone. A decade ago if anyone had told me we would be felling 80 foot tall spruce trees I would have thought they were crazy. By the way, I got Paulette behind the steering wheel of the truck for the first time a few days ago. I felt it was important that she know how to drive it.
No more moose by the RV but we see fresh tracks each morning on the property. The chain saw noise probably keeps them away, which is a good thing while we are working. Geese migrating north stop and feed by the river. And some beautiful black and white ducks like an adjacent sandbar, but they take flight when we come to the edge to observe them.
In the pix with Paulette and the chainsaw you see a wall of mostly small trees and three twelve inchers behind and to the left of her. All those trees are now removed. I paced it and we have cleared 280 feet fifteen feet wide, as well as most of a 100 foot diameter circle at the end for the cabin. Only peripheral trees and those that hinder the view remain.