IS WILDERNESS LIVING IN THE GREAT NORTH FOR YOU?

Do you long for wilderness living in the great north?

Is wilderness living in the great north for you? You may take a moment to imagine…

The bustle of traffic is fading into the distance. The rumbling engines, honking horns, and radios droning are somewhere off beyond the horizon. You are the master of your new domain. Free in a way that you never were among the crowds and urban sprawl. Here, among the wilderness you find peace, right outside your door, the possibility of adventure, should you choose it.

You walk out your front door and listen to the sounds around you, and all you hear is the sound of nature; the wind rustling through the trees,  bird songs and chattering of squirrels. The great outdoors awaits you. The night sky glows with the light of millions of stars unmasked by the urban glow.

The call of the barred owl in the night, the howl of a wolf in the distance, It is only then that you realize what you have been missing. This!  This is food for the soul.

Life moves at a different pace, on wilderness time, if you will, when you aren't living in the chaos of the city. As you meander down a path, you stop and smell the flowers, there are no muttered curses, or pressing of impatient bodies struggling past you on the street.  No longer do you walk briskly past hundreds of strangers faces instead there are a hundred ancient and familiar trees.

Homesteading folks are different in the bush, though they be 100 miles up or down the river, they will plod through the most hostile conditions to assist, should a “neighbor” need help. If you're unfortunate enough to get stuck in the snow or overflow, you can bet your boots, that some burly fellow with a big ole truck and chain, or snow machine will yank you out before you freeze. It's just the way of life out in the bush to prevent frozen hands and frozen toes.

I think this way of life develops for a couple of reasons. When you are far from urban conveniences you must be prepared, and you prepare not only for yourself but for those few around you.  As you are in a much less populated area, resources and services often need to be combined or shared. As you become more self sufficient you'll find there's a real feel good pride with conquering obstacles, not needing to call for help or waiting for another to fix it and hand you the bill.

When you no longer have a neighbor within earshot, you can set up a target range right in your own backyard, if you like. Hunt, fish or hike in your own back woods, Grow your own food, just steps from your door. Play guitar, sing with abandon, It's freedom in its truest form.

If you long for wilderness living in the great north, the tranquility of nature, the wild adventure of the wilderness, and the freedom to follow your own path, if you’ve been wallowing in the doldrums of discontent, dissatisfied with your routine and dull existence, if you’ve been contemplating and seeking a new direction, a life change that is challenging, fresh and lively, it might be time to take your path... Into the wild.

WILDERNESS LIVING in a tent! ~ HOW MUCH FOR PEOPLE IN A CANDY WRAPPER?

 

         THIS IS A SHORT VIDEO THAT IS SO INCREDIBLE, THE REAL DEAL, WELL DONE, BY A GIRL LIVING IN THE YUKON IN A TENT IN TOTAL WILDERNESS. WELL WORTH A FEW MINUTES TO WATCH. I WISH SHE'D MAKE MORE!
             
       My first summer in northern Canada and Alaska was a real eye opener for me.  I had very little money and was making the trip in a little Geo Prism and a tent. I left from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I had a car top carrier full of dehydrated food, a trunk full of tents and gear, and a backseat full of sleeping bags, a dog and a 6 yr old.
       I wanted to see ALL of ALASKA so that I could come home and shop "online" for a piece of land there knowing what the general area and terrain was like in a given location.   I ended up going 11,000 miles that summer. (My car died about 60 miles after returning home) ~ that was a close call. Sure glad I didn't head up to the Arctic Ocean like I was thinking at the time.  

        Since my journey really started after crossing the Minnesota border into Canada.  I quickly found us in very rural countryside heading north.  We drove in 20 hour stretches looking for a camp ground.  Only when we were completely exhausted of looking at mile after mile of countryside did a campground seem to appear. We had a goal of getting into Alaska as quickly as possible.  Prior to crossing the border,  we had spent the night at a camp ground was in Northern Minnesota. We had pulled in around midnight, set up our tent quickly, thinking we were going to FINALLY get some sleep.... WHAT WERE WE THINKING? Sleep is NOT something you get on an adventure! 

About a half hour after we arrived at our first campsite,  a van drove up to our peaceful setting, it was full of some interestingly intoxicated occupants who were certain they were suppose to meet us there. We reassured them that we had NO IDEA who they were and that they were the last thing we needed for company in our endeavor to get a good nights sleep. We urged them to depart, which took some convincing, but they did finally leave and we had our trusty double barrel shotgun join us for the night instead. So wearily we turned in to once again try to sleep. Suddenly there was a loud SMACK on the water behind the tent    ....There was a large canal behind our tent and unbeknownst to us it was inhabited by very large carp or gar jumping from the water and coming down with an awful tremendous SMACK. That went on all night until day break. So we awoke almost rested and headed north. We crossed the border in the middle of the night around 2 am in North Dakota. The Canadian border guards had a million questions, (really just 2 questions asked a half a million different ways. Namely why were we coming into Canada and when are we leaving...welcome to Canada! This was doubly interesting because we had a son with us who was born at home and didn't have a birth certificate at the time. This bit of information would come into play later, however with some explaining they let us cross.)  The border agents kindly let us in with the small $25 fee per firearm , so lightened our wallets of about $150 right off the bat.  We traveled hours and hours into Saskatchewan where you you could see so far across the horizon that you could see the curve of the Earth!  Its easy to see there how so many millions of bison/buffalo could roam those vast prairies. The prairies are enormous! There's just no way to describe how you can drive for days and never reach the horizon. Coming along a back road we spied a sign for a camp ground at a lake. So we turned off expecting to come upon the campground within the first couple of miles. A few miles further on we see another sign telling us to turn at the road up ahead, after about 17 miles of signs we finally arrive at the campground to find a bewildered hostess who had no idea what to charge for two people and a kid in a "candy wrapper" (a tent -in bear country), so she tells me to wait a second while she calls the owner and I hear her whispering, "yeah, they're wanting to stay in a candy wrapper, how much do I charge them?" This was our first initiation into bear country where people, sane ones anyway, just didn't camp in tents. The owner arrived at a price which included all the cut campfire wood we needed and just a tip that we should keep our food packed away, there's been a couple bears off and on around the campsites, particularly in the back more secluded areas such as we had asked for....Well that was comforting!
    As it turned out we spent a couple of months wandering around Alaska after leaving Canada and never saw a bear near our tent. We were assaulted by storms so bad the winds pushed the roof of our tent down into our faces as we slept, rain that poured like a river requiring a second tent to be put over the first to keep out the driving rain, motes to be dug to divert the raging torrents coming off the tent. We had a moose cruise past the side of the tent on the one foot of space of the tent pad that stuck out past the tent. It was pretty unnerving to think of hooves carrying 1200 lbs just inches from my face. There were the unknown silent things (probably bears!)that we could neither hear, see, or smell that sent our dog into a barking ruckus in the middle of the nights, but overall our tent stay was fairly uneventful. The Alaskan nights (mind you its still broad daylight at night) in June and July did surprise us by dipping down into the 20's and 30's in some places particularly in higher elevations.

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!