UNBEARABLE REMODELING/ ILLEGAL ENTRY/An UNINVITED Guest in the Wilderness!!!

  It was 7:30 am, the drive started at 2:30 pm the day before. I had been called away from my cabin weeks earlier to tend to funeral arrangements of a close friend. I was very tired from my long drive returning to my cabin. After 12 hours of driving I had stopped near a campground 5 hours ago, but not finding a suitable tent spot and with a steady rain coming down

I made the decision to continue on the last 5 hours of the journey to the cabin.
The drive was long, hard, it was dark, no lights to look at, hardly any towns along the way. I was tired and fatigued and just wanted to "GET THERE" and flop into my bed and SLEEP. As Fatigue sets in and I become tired, I drive slower and slower and slower, the trip gets longer and longer and longer!
  When I finally arrived, my driveway was missing! It was gone!

It had been swallowed up by 4 ft undergrowth and could not be deciphered from the 6 ft deep ditch on either side of my narrow passageway in to my cabin. The entire roadside was just a jungle mass of wildflowers, shrubs and willows that literally grew overnight.  I told my friend, this is where my drive is suppose to be. The light shade of a gray dawn were just a haze and we squinted our eyes trying to see any hint of a passage way. The rain beat down on the windshield and the steady rhythm of the wipers gave us intermittent views of clarity, but it was no use. I had to get out to feel with my feet and find terre ferme.  That was the moment when I was revived....The barrage of mosquitoes descended on me like a dust storm.

I couldn't breath, I couldn't see, and I was dancing and scratching and swatting and squashing the buggars by the millions! UGH! I jumped quickly back in the car having located the edge of the drive with my foot having felt through the vegetation. A quick prayer and some gas and I was past the car eating crevasse.

 I hate that driveway!  Quickly the cabin came into sight. Whew! Made it! So I thought...
I made up my mind to make a 1.3 second Olympic style sprint and entrance to the cabin which in my assessment should only let in about 450,000 mosquitoes.

A substantially smaller amount than what would be gathering in a horde outside the door. So, I grabbed the keys tightly in my hand and made the lightning dash to the door. I quickly and with great efficiency unlocked the padlock and.........
didn't open the door. I was being eaten alive,

I could feel myself going anemic and the sting of a million biting bloodsucking insects made me rethink our decision made so many months ago to screw the

heavy plank door shut with 5 inch lag screws. We were "securing" the cabin against the arrival of uninvited guests of both the 2 legged and 4 legged varieties. People and bears. Well, it obviously can keep people out my voice shouted in my head. My hands and face were swelling with gigantic welts. There were so many that I no longer itched, it was just the all encompassing hum of pain. I couldn't feel the new mosquitoes biting anymore as the bit areas of exposed skin was already swollen.  I could through my fatigue vaguely feel the shape of my face changing shape as I struggled through a sleepy mental fog trying to decide what to do about my predicament... How to get into the cabin.
    The cabin had been built with the idea of protecting it from the bears, so all the screws used in construction were large and long and required generator power and a power drill to remove them from the wood board and batten plank and plywood walls. The windows were small to conserve heat and high to make access for the bears more difficult. Since I didn't have a generator or a power drill outside the cabin at this point, the door was no longer an option for entrance, so I turned my attention to the lowest window.  The bottom of the window was about 6 feet up as the cabin was built up above the snowline on tall pilings. I had gone around the corner of the cabin and been out of sight of the vehicle for quite a while and I was now joined by my teenage son and my friend who were both wondering what I was doing that was taking so long.  What I was doing was assessing the best way to break into a cabin that had been designed to thwart just such endeavors!
     I determined that I could climb up on top of our wood pile and if I can stretch my legs far apart I might be able to reach the edge of the windowsill with a foot.  My teenage son suggested since he was taller and had longer arms and legs he might be able to reach the plywood that was screwed over the window and might be able to unscrew the smaller screws that fastened it to the frame. I handed him the screwdriver and in moments the board was off. However, the window was still shut and locked. It was an older window and had become worn out over the decades and was already vintage when we bought it to use on the cabin. We shimmied it back and forth in its track until it came out of its track and we were able to push it open and my son climbed in and made it look quite easy.

As I mentioned before, it is a very small window and a very high window and it was quite a stretch from the top of the wood pile to the window sill.  After a series of twists, bends, and stretching that would have impressed a contortionist, I was in!

 Now it was my friends turn. This might be a good time to mention that she is 71 years old (going on 19!)

and she was looking skeptically at her choices but in the end the mosquitoes were a very motivating factor.

She quickly made the decision to join us in the cabin and get some reprieve from in incessant buzz and biting of the demonic insects. Little did we know....

    We walked from the bedroom to the kitchen....Um, it used to be a kitchen.  It was a vision of some surreal paper mache piece of rogue art.

There was 10 pounds of flour, 5 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of salt, several bottles of maple syrup...opened and now empty, 5 pounds of oatmeal, teabags, coffee, various canned goods, and bear poop all pasted in a sick concoction in a thick layer over everything.  The cabinets and cupboards had been torn from the walls and lay in unrecognizable splinters on the floor amongst the rubble. The shelves were knocked down and disheveled dumping their contents onto the heap.  Even in my sleepy fog it was not lost on me that had I walked around just one more corner of the cabin I would have been able to just "walk right in" where the wall was missing! It was completely open to the sky, the woods, and the fiendish mosquitoes. I was really starting to whine in my head to myself... "I just want to go to bed!!!" I was just this side of having a temper tantrum and bursting into tears similar to those of a typical toddler at nap time, except I wanted to go to bed!

 Well, there was nothing to do about that, sleep was to be hours away! First there was the firearm to be loaded. Then there was the piece of plywood that had been taken off the window that was used to hastily put over the hole in the wall. This involved getting the generator out of storage that had just a tiny amount of gasoline in it, with some quick tuning it soon roared to life and powered the drill to secure the patch to the wall with screws. It was an agonizing task with the concern of the bear at our back, and the flesh eating insects as thick as fog all around, penetrating all the openings of our bodies, our eyes, nose, ears and mouth and the ever present desire for sleep. (I had now been awake for 30 hours making my dexterity equal to that of about a 4 yr old). When that task was complete we turned our attention to a murderous spree of annihilating the droves of blood thirsty insects

that were plotting against us. We felt some measure of success when we would find less than 5 mosquitoes at a time on any given part of exposed flesh.  It was still just before dawn when we entered the cabin and so were unaware of the scope of destruction that was revealed as the dawn lightened the cabin. I have to admit that the catastrophe was impressive even by candlelight.  As we made headway in the extermination of the skeeters, the beds were starting to whisper my name  ever more loudly and persistently. Finally I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer and flopped down. I laid there for about 4 seconds before I heard the first slight whining sound near my ear, then two, then three, soon the buzzing pitch was rising in measurable decibels. The sun was fully over the horizon now and the heat was building, it was humid from the rain and yet I pulled a fur blanket completely over me, over my head and face leaving just a small breathing hole.

It was a hot but safe refuge from the cloud of insects hovering over my now snoring carcass.  An earthquake could not have awakened me! I never want to make cabin repairs in the spring again! Going bear huntin', going bear huntin', going bear huntin', Got a score to settle and food to replace!

What Do you DO up there? Gearing up for FISHING at Our wilderness living homestead!!!

When discussing wilderness living, Alot of people ask, 
           "WHAT do you DO up there?" 

That was a question we too were asking before we were "Up there".  I think the thing that goes unsaid or maybe unnoticed by those who are "up there" is that we dont "DO"  things in the sense that urban dwellers do. When we were urbanly sequestered, we often "planned" our days to "do" this or "do" that, be it grocery shopping, retail shopping, mowing the yard, going out for dinner, seeing movies or other such happenings that are planned in day to day living in an urban environment. ...But, what does a person do when they live in a remote location where there are no shopping malls, no restaurants, no lawns, no bowling, etc?  Well, let's see...

When we arrived in our wilderness living remote location, we greeted alot of trees. We found ourselves standing on a large acreage parcel that was never developed in any way. It was a piece of raw land of towering trees, thick underbrush, swamp and wildlife galore.  We stood there with a chainsaw in hand and a gas can in the other and wondered, "where do we start?" It was quite overwhelming! Alot of green and nothing else besides mosquitoes and blue sky.

Since we had no place to stay we left for the nearest town and rented the cheapest motel room we could find to sleep for the first 2 nights. We could only afford 2 nights so had to have a building up in 3 days, ready to sleep in on the third night. It quickly became obvious, that cutting wood was going to be one of those things we "DO" up here.  My husband had brought along a small Alaskan chainsaw mill and got right to work cutting fallen trees into boards for the "cabin" we had set a small goal of an 8'x8' "cabin" 

that we would add onto in 8'x8' sections. Bears were a big worry since they weren't very shy, none of the wildlife was, as they rarely encountered humans in this location and didnt mind strolling into camp as usual. We wanted to get 4 walls and a door up as quickly as possible, worry about the roof later. :)
Little did we know the bears were the least of our troubles, the mosquitoes were going to be our biggest adversary!  Which brings me to one of the other things we "do", " we war against mosquitoes!" There's the smudge fire, the deet, the swatter, the screens (that are questionable in their usefulness as there are so many cracks in the rustic boards, doorways, and window frames that must all have "welcome signs" posted at each of the openings, which allow the little buggars to enter uninhibited!). 
                             
Another thing that makes it hard to narrow down what we "DO" is that you can't plan what you are going to "do". When you live remotely you invariably never have all the things you need to do a project. So you are constantly having to "make do", or figure out how to "do without". So much time is used up trying to compensate for a lack of needed tools, supplies, parts, daylight, sunshine, etc. So just the "doing" is what we "do".  EVERYTHING we do takes so much more time than in urban settings. In town, in a garage, your tools are all handy, along with electricity,  and the hardware store is just down the street. In a remote location though, Your husband, wife, or child, may be using your hammer just when you need it or have used it and left it "who knows where" and it might take an hour just to find the hammer! Likely you will bend over and grab a large hunk of branch or log to pound with, which will be effective, but will take longer (as usual) than using above mentioned hammer. In variably you will run out of nails or screws in the middle of a project (like the roof) and will require unforeseen trips to town many miles away, eating up precious daylight hours.

Another thing we "DO", is try to get everything done during daylight, since there is no electricity. Candle power or lumens take on new meaning when it is applied to real candles and not electric lighting. Trying to do detailed work in 4 or 6 candle power is challenging and time consuming!

When all the building is finally completed and the big fluffy flakes of snow start to gently fall from the sky, there is something else we "DO", we pour hot coffee from the pot on the woodstove, into our mugs, we prop up our weary feet under a quilt on the bed/sofa that we built with our own hands, We watch the flakes fall in a dizzying array of wonder and beauty, while soaking up the warm heat from the fire crackling in the stove and reflect on the satisfaction of all we have accomplished in the proceeding months. So these are some of the things we "DO" up here!

Getting to be time to think about tapping trees. As the weather warms during the day and freezes at night there is a brief window of time that the tree pushes sugar filled sap up from the roots to the top of the tree to create energy for the tree to bloom. It generally happens when the days are 35f degrees to 40f degrees  during the day, and when the nights fall below freezing 32f degrees. This is the ideal time to draw off sap to make Maple or Birch syrup or sugar.  After the nights warm to above freezing the tree will bloom and the sap will cease to flow adequately for syruping and the season ends. Here are some pics of trees we've tapped... 

We put out about 60-100 taps each spring.  Each tree gives about 15 gallons of sap in a good year.  It will take approximately 40-50 gallons of sap to boil down into 1 gallon of pure maple syrup. No sugar is added! All the sugar comes straight from the tree! *********************************     NATIVE AMERICANS have a legend .....that says that the maple tree used to give forth straight pure syrup right from the tree. But the men would all tap the trees and lay beneath them all day drinking the sweet candy syrup, and they got fat and lazy.  So the Great Spirit got angry and opened the tops off all the trees and filled them with water...And that is why men must now work to evaporate off 50 gallons of water to get 1 gallon of the sweet pure syrup!

When the sap comes from the tree it is clear as shown here...

When the sap is heated over the fires the sugars concentrate as evaporation of the water occurs... as the sugars begin to roast over the flames it turns golden just like marshmallows do when you roast them...

.... See how the sap that is roasting in the pan above is turning golden compared to the sap just warming in the pan to the left of it in the picture above?

Below is the finished syrup.  We keep the fires burning about 20 hours a day for about 2 weeks straight! We are really tired, literally exhausted by the end of the run.  We usually make about 15 -20 finished gallons of syrup about a year's supply for our family of 4.

With Syruping Season finished... We are moving on to FISHING SEASON!!!

The weather has been pretty cold, there is still about a foot of snow on the ground but there have been some intermittent warm days, and a few sprinkles so spring is about to SPRING, I hope!!! We are anxiously awaiting ICE OUT ...(but ITS STILL A FOOT DEEP) !

The kids and hubby have taken up the lure making hobby as of late to help assuage  the "fishin' itch".

They are in different stages of carving some wooden lures

as well as in the process of tying up some flies.

This isnt anything my husband or young sons have done before, nor have they any prior experience, and no one to give them instructions, so please forgive their learning curve, but I was impressed with their progress and cant wait to try them out myself. They have started quite a variety so far, poppers, lures and hope to use them for PIKE, WALLEYE, TROUT, PANFISH....These lures aren't Cabela's or Bass Pro, but they are our own made with our own hands that we hope will provide fun and food in the very near future! We'll keep you posted on how well they worked! They are proud of their first production! Its been a good time for dad and sons!