Winter Solstice Day at an Alaska Cabin

Everyone's life undulates with daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms, determined often by routine tasks.  At our remote home, winter chores are determined by weather and prioritized by heat, water, and food.

Below is a sample winter day, at this off-grid, off-road home in the boonies of Alaska (with notes about the subsequent -2 and -22F days that followed).

Dec 21 (+17 degrees)

HEAT and POWER:  When my husband is home, he gets up several times a night to stoke the fire.  But yesterday he flew out to attend a meeting in Anchorage.  Since I am a sound sleeper, I awoke to a chilly interior temperature of +47F. The power had gone out during the night, too, darn it. Naturally, at latitude 61 at 6 am, it was pitch black - and would stay that way for another three hours.  I donned my winter-usual attire: two shirts, two socks and a pair of lined sweat pants, as well as a headlight that I keep by the bed, to venture down the circular stairs to the main room, where I started  a fire in the squat little wood stove from the tinder, kindling, and log boxes lined up by the back door.  While it caught, I moved the all important coffee pot onto the propane stove, and bundled up to walk back through the woods, to the power shed, about 450 feet above and behind the cabin.  It was snowing lightly under a hazy, quarter moon.  On the way, I emptied the chamber pot into the outhouse.

I am not a morning person, so I hate having to face the cold and yank the generator pre-dawn, before coffee.  But December delivers miserly amounts of solar and wind power, so we supplement with two hours of generator to provide interior phone, lights, and Internet.   At the shed, I checked the voltage meter's record when the power conked out.  Hmmm, it is higher than I would wish at these temperatures. I hope the batteries aren't dying.  I tugged futily on the generator rope five times before it roared to life. Pleeeeeease connect!  My glasses fogged up from the exertion.

Motion detector lights illuminated the snowy path as I return past the woodshed,

food shed and outhouse to the cabin.  The buildings look pretty - the steep angled roofs and the log or green painted walls.  I spied animal tracks,  sharply outlined by shadow, mostly hares and voles diving below the insulation of snow covered bushes.  I reflect on the hungry black mink I saw yesterday, bounding through snow to close the distance to a gray hare twice its size. On the back porch, I grab an armload of logs, and step inside, smiling at the orange fire and the welcome scent of coffee, which I sweeten with dried milk and honey from our bees, and scoot under an alpaca blanket to read the Internet news and emails.   I always check weather first, which determines tasks I can or should do that day. Today is supposed to be clear and in the teens, followed by a deepening cold snap that I don't look forward to:-2F and then -22F.  Those will be days for indoor projects.  

Obviously the number of logs we burn depends on the external (and internal)

temperature.  In the teens, we use about 15 logs per day to warm the two room cabin.  At 0 F, the number doubles and at -15F triples. This number of logs heats a two room cabin to the 50s and low 60s.  As you can imagine, my most important winter task is to haul plastic sled loads of aged, dry birch wood that my husband has felled, chopped, cut, aged and stacked during the prior two years, from the roofed wood corral to the back porch, and then, on a daily basis, fill the interior bins with bigger and smaller wood.  Let's just say that I never postpone this chore.

Bear Neighbors

Piquing a bear's curiosity

Living on the far side of three, bridgeless rivers,  we are less concerned about human intruders than ursine ones.  In fact, we don't even have locks on our cabin. This reflects one aspect of “bush protocol” which is that if an honest person  needs to get into your cabin while you are gone it might be for a really serious reason.  In fact, a friend with a remote cabin taped to the inside of her  door a note with her name and home phone number, saying that a lost or endangered wanderer is welcome to use supplies in the building but when home, safe and sound, please let her know what has been used up.  

An alert  visitor to our home might notice that our entrances are constructed differently than city ones.  In town, home and hotel door hinges are attached INSIDE the door, away from the prying tools of bad guys. By contrast, our hinges hang on the EXTERIOR because we aren't worried about visitors with opposable thumbs.  Rather, we are trying to deter 300-700 lb hairy bruins inclined to shove in a weak door. With four inch thick doors that open outward, and a sturdy  doorstop inside the doorjam, we hope to retard the forward momentum of a foraging bear.

A bear's goal of attack; the food shed

Windows are obviously more fragile than doors. Next to each of our entrances is a double sheeted plate glass window.  I don't kid myself - the big 4x5 picture window in front is vulnerable.  I just hope that its position,  up eight steps and 8 feet above ground level evades detection.  Besides, neither porch window opens, and therefore neither emits any beckoning scents.  One time, a bear did indeed lumber up onto my back porch, bump against the door, stand up and look in the high window above my stove, eye level with me (inside).  However, it was my banging on the window that attracted her curiosity, rather than encouraging her departure, as intended.  My bad. 

Another friend described a sight I would have loved to see (from a distance.)  He was inside his cabin when a bear ambled up to a low window and peeked in.  The light was such that instead of seeing the interior, the animal viewed the reflection of a very close bear looking right back!  Outta there!  

Weather Trumps Everything in Rural Living (Alaska): Enjoy it!

One of the things I like best about living in a climate with rapid seasonal variations is the constant “use it or lose it” lessons in appreciation.  Everything changes so fast here that I can only “see these beauties” or “do those activities” at specific times of year, some as brief as a week.  Miss it?  Wait a year!  So, we have no “mañana, mañana” attitude.    This fact contributes a celebratory immediacy to waking up every single day.   Below are seasonal notes for our home, at Latitude 61, in Southcentral Alaska.

WINTER:

View across the lake in winter

Temperatures:  Normal:  -20 F - +20 F, November - March

Transportation:  Ski plane and snowmachines, snowshoes, cross country skis, bunny boots

Beauty: A silent, black and white world

Favorite images:  heavy snow coating tree branches and buildings; lacy ice halos on birch canopies; the aurora borealis, our log cabin puffing birch smoke from the chimney.

Animals:  Audible/ visible owls, eagles, and ravens, and coyotes.  We see tracks of quieter animals in the woods, like martins, hares, foxes.  Once a lynx (I think).

Favorite activities:
Outdoors: Snowshod and booted walks, cross country skiing, snowmachine treks through the pretty woods and across frozen lakes and bogs,  tracking animals, seeing dog mushers and moose, ice fishing picnics, grooming trails, beautiful regional flights.
Indoors:  no urgency to leave during three day snowstorms or deep cold and dark; starting seeds on every window ledge as I plan the gardens, on-line classes and book immersion.

The Unpredictability of Raising Food

Raising one's own food - whether it is a pot of herbs on a window sill or a farm - is a satisfying endeavor.  But the results can be unpredictable.  Usually the variances are due to my own errors, but Mother Nature throws curve balls each year, too. For people who live in a town, a failure of a crop just means a trip to the supermarket.  But for people living remotely, as we do, learning to grow, harvest, and store food is a high priority.  We made many naive mistakes, and sometimes took several years to draw logical conclusions and make appropriate changes.  Now, though, we raise and forage for about 65 foods, including meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and sweets.

For readers who think, "One of these days, I'll throw some seeds in the ground," may the following highs and lows of our experience help you start off better and advance faster than we did.  Notes are organized for perennial and annual plants, eggs, meat, honey bees, and harvesting/storing food.

PERENNIAL PLANTS:
Perennial plants, both native and domesticated, are NO BRAINERS.  They can produce for decades, require very little care, and the wild ones offer excellent information about the types of plants well suited to your locale.

How I Harvest Wild Plants for Food and Remedies

Fireweed, clover, and yarrow on our
property in Southcentral Alaska

Many resources (books and online) that encourage readers to collect wild plants for food, medicine, and other purposes, neglect to describe WHEN and HOW to harvest, dry, and store them.  This deterred me for several years.  Then I met a delightful woman who has become my mentor - the go-to person anytime a cartoon-like “Huh?” forms above my head.   By trial and error, year by year, I am learning about the bounty in my midst.  My new enthusiasm combines elements of botany, gardening, wandering, observation, research, and cooking.  It is increasing my independence as well as my respect for Mother Nature.

Below, I answer FAQs that may help other novices who want to get started on simple preparations of plants they recognize as safe and not sprayed by pesticides.  The questions are sequenced from plant harvest to storage through preparation.