I received word that one of my fellow pilots passed away. Early the next morning Heaven turned on the lights to welcome him home. Rest in peace Cornbread.Earthquakes close by since midnight.We are the blue dot.
The View from the Outhouse
From Silty Slough, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!!
I woke up about 6:30 this morning to take Cooper out. Nothing doing for the little bear, Teddy is a sleepyhead. I was catching up on the fan mail from yesterday’s post, both replies. Shortly after 8 o’clock an unforecast earthquake started shaking the asylum here at Silty Slough. I say unforecast because the dogs and cat give usually me a 1 to 2 second warning when they hear it coming before I do. Earthquakes are pretty common here, so it is usually no big deal to jiggle around a little bit. Our cabin is on 19-6″ diameter steel pilings driven about 10′ into the ground, so it doesn’t shake often. The design comes from wanting to be a civil engineer before I caught the flying sickness. The earth started to move at 8:11, Cooper and Oden just started looking at me. The initial jolt was pretty firm, then continued as a slow rolling rumble. Normally they don’t last that long. I didn’t time it, but it lasted at least 40 seconds. It was long enough that I was starting to get concerned that another big shake was on the way. The cabin was shaking more than I have seen it shake before. What I really noticed was the Christmas Tree shaking. It isn’t decorated yet, but I spent 4 hours yesterday trying to get all the lights working. I had my whole arsenal of testers and tools and MacGyver still couldn’t get them to work. This pre-lit tree is now pre-booked on the next ride out of here to the MatSu Landfill. Did the earth move for you too?
Back up to yesterday morning, the boiler didn’t light off and posted an error code. Kari called the boiler repairman. Luckily, he was in the area, so she got him out of bed to change a temperature sensor. The Silty Slough Plumbing, Heating, and Hardware store happened to have one in stock. Mam that is going to cost you a coffee cake and a pumpkin roll for all the trouble. She made 2 pumpkin rolls but insisted the wood rack be filled. Three loads up the stairs and stacked in the rack, we don’t even need a fire it’s hot in here.
It’s coming up on 4 o’clock, I’ve been helping Kari rattle pans all day. My biggest chore was watching the dough rise for the rolls, with a short break for a snowmachine ride to assess any earthquake damage. The only thing I found was a roll of paper towels that fell off the shelf in the commissary. Time to eat a good meal of ham, garlic butter sweet potato stacks, honey butter corn, fruit salad, and the rolls that I helped watch the dough rise.
Everyone have a very Happy Thanksgiving and stay safe.
Thank you, Lord, for your many blessings whether we recognize them or not.
Good morning, from Silty Slough. It’s 26 degrees at 9 am. The forecast is for a high of 33 this afternoon, but I don’t think it’s going to make it. The sun is just peeking under the overcast. Sunrise at 9:31 and sunset scheduled for 4:09, total daylight 6 hours and 37 minutes. We will continue to lose daylight for 31 more days. The river is showing a few more wet spots than yesterday. Sometimes in years past we were able to travel in the local neighborhood to get together with neighbors for Thanksgiving dinner. It doesn’t look like the river is going to co-operate this year.
That makes an annual event that happened last week really important this year, The Alaska Turkey Bomb. Years ago, just before Thanksgiving Kenney Hughes would drop turkeys to residents in this area. I believe he passed away and the residents did without turkey for Thanksgiving. About 3 years ago a lady from town that grew up out here in Skwentna resurrected the event. With the help of donations and volunteers it has expanded and covers more area now. Turkeys are dropped from airplanes to families that are out here and are unable to travel to town to get one for Thanksgiving. This year a nice burlap coffee bag was dropped that contained a turkey, candy, and coffee. I tried to place a link to a YouTube video for the story. https://youtu.be/k1YHGrHQwPU
Yesterday a neighbor showed up in a helicopter completely full of Amazon packages, fresh fruit, vegetables, a turkey, and a Starlink Mini to test out on the trails.
In one of the packages were a couple thermometers to monitor the woodstove. Since I added the Cadillac converter (catalytic…see previous post) there has been a learning curve on operating it with the most efficiency. There are a few good YouTube videos for our particular stove that I have been watching. One thing about YouTube is you have to be able to sort the flyshit from the pepper. Anyway, one thermometer monitors the top of the stove (also good when Kari is using the Alaskan crock pot) and the other monitors the stack temperature or EGT in airplane talk. When the catalytic converter lights off the stack temperature will run 1100-1200 degrees. I don’t think you want to go to Wal-Mart for your stove pipe. One good feature of the thermometers is that you can set a temperature for them to alarm in case it gets too high. Setting the parameters with instructions translated from Chinese is a college level course. I think I may have gotten a passing grade. The next time in town, I need to bring my infrared thermometer from the hangar out here. Not so much for the stove but to check the temperature of the ice and the flowing water in the river. May be interesting.
I would like to go fly the drone and check the river, but things may be more peaceful if I go out and pump 220 gallons of electricity into the diesel tank for the generator. Kari always helps and it is a nice enough day for it.
We let the fire go out this morning since it is fairly warm outside and we need to clean out the ashes. I guess the biggest reason is that Thor is in town for Thanksgiving, so that puts me on wood duty. Conserve, conserve, conserve.
Mayor Cooper had a birthday a couple days ago, 7 years old. He and Teddy are cooking up a new scam. The Silty Slough Ice Classic, and The Adopt a Yentna River Iceberg program. They are working on a waiver for the definition of iceberg. Google says it has to be 15 meters long so ours may not qualify. If you have access to Google you know it all.
That’s about all the happenings at the Slough. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
Thank you, Lord, for watching over us and for giving us enough.
The river ice is starting to move. It is totally different than last year, very calm, no chunks or icebergs Still frozen. 3 machines went by about 2 days before it was open water.View from the covered porch.The ugly overflow quagmire. We have the freight sled out already.You can see my footprints in the snow. Yes, the water is over my boots.Steve Butts and I stopped to check our load.
The View from the Outhouse
Good morning from Silty Slough. It is 7am, the boys and I have already been outside. The ground is a little crunchy and the puddles are iced over. Temp is 29 and is forecast to hit 50. The days are getting longer very quickly. Sunrise was at 5:24 and will set at 10:37. 17 hours and 13 minutes today. We are already making free electricity and will be able to make quite a bit more than we can use. The new batteries are working out fine. We use less than 20 percent of their capacity overnight before the sun starts to charge them back up. The generator has only had to start once in the past 6 weeks or so. That was to run the electric clothes dryer on wash day. It has been mostly sunny for as long as I can remember with only one light rain shower. The river started flowing a little over a week ago, actually it has been flowing all winter, we just can’t see it under the ice. Anyway, the ice has melted, broken up, and floated downstream. It is open for 25 miles or so then the ice has it blocked up. The slough still has a lot of ice in it especially on the shady side so we are still unable to travel off our property. A lot of the snow has melted in the yard so we put the snow machines to bed and brought out the wheeled vehicles, 4 wheelers, side by side, and the Kubota tractor. We still have a few more days to go until the snow is gone and everything is dried out. With the slough not being open, to get to the main river we have our own wade versus row decision to make. Cooper is watching the Democrat cats to be sure they don’t leak anything ahead of time.
Cooper and Teddy have been enjoying being outside in the sun. Cooper gets a lot of deck time watching for eagles, seagulls, and airplanes that invade the airspace. Then it is a chase until they are out of sight.
Cooper and Teddy hatched up this plan to take a helicopter into town just before the river opens up enough to get in on the first barge trip. Then we can get our boat ready, get the cats to the vet, and get more building materials rounded up to bring back out on the boat when the river opens. Sounds like a plan, just need to get the timing right and $575 for the chopper. They are in discussions with the Silty Slough Comptroller of the Currency as we speak.
Mayor Cooper and Teddy have been busy with government affairs here in the slough. Just to be ahead of the game they drafted a proclamation. Anyone applying for employment at Silty Slough that has had a student loan forgiven will not be considered. Cooper says it is an ethics issue. If you take out a loan and weasel out on paying it back, how good of an employee would you be?
I’m tryin to decide on the activity for the day. The things I want to do vary greatly from the things I need to do. The to do list is long.
The last post left everyone at the end of January. The knots on my head have gone down since the birthday cake episode.
February was pretty uneventful. Steve Butts and I made a few trips hauling fuel with the guys before he headed back to Seattle mid month. After looking at the calendar the second half of February was a little bit eventful. We have been having snow machine problems for some time. I suspect bad fuel.
Friday Feb 18
Cory, Roger, and I were in Rogers shop working on one of my machines. Alcohol may have been involved. Cory suggested we go to Imms’ Inn to get something to eat. Ok alert the women, and soon we had a quorum of 5 headed 8 miles down river. Kari and I have never stopped there before, when we rode into the lot it was full of snow machines. Big crowd inside, nice place. Roger ordered whatever they were cooking that night for the group. Italian beef and a couple bottles of wine. Roger and Cory were playing ping pong and thought they were doing great, I think it was just the alcohol playing. Pretty soon the rest of the crowd got tired of retrieving the stray balls and things settled down. Food was good and we finally decided to make the 10 mile trek back to Silty Slough.
The boys were glad to see us and had to give us a thorough sniffing to see if we had been with any other dogs and to check what we had to eat. Teddy always licks to see if I dribbled on my shirt. Tonight is the farthest Kari has been away from the cabin since we came up on the boat last fall.
Saturday Feb 19
Today we are packing up to go into town. I’m going to get my eye surgery and then Kari is going to Michigan for 3 weeks after I’m able to ride back out to the cabin.
Sunday Feb 20
It is Kari’s first trip to town in about 5 months. I’m pulling a sled with the boys in their kennel, some empty propane bottles, and a few totes. Kari just has her machine. It isn’t running good, I have my SkiDoo this time since the Arctic Cat is also running bad. There is overflow in the normal spots since it has been very warm. The last trip I made with the guys was pretty mushy. Everything was going pretty good for the first 30 miles, then Kari’s machine kept loosing power and she would have to shut it off, then restart it and it would be ok again for a mile or so. About 5 miles from the landing she had enough and we swapped rides. Now she is pulling the sled with the dogs on board.
It was just starting to get dark and about 3 miles out of the landing was a really ugly bunch of overflow. The slush looked deep and there were big water holes. I couldn’t see any way around it. It is a long way back to Silty Slough. I tried to pick the best spot I could see to go through. Here goes. Through the mush and then immediately up an incline to get on top of a sandbar. Now I’m about 8 or 10 feet above the mushy hole. Kari followed, she almost made it across with her machine and the sled was stuck in the mush with water up to the deck. I’m about 20 yards away. She is yelling “My dogs are drowning”. I can’t run because I’m sinking up to my knees in the snow, so I lay down and roll. I got to here machine and walked on the tongue to get to the dogs. They are still dry. I opened the kennel and let them out. Everybody is ok but we are in a real quagmire.
It wasn’t long and some guys came up behind us. Dave Miller and Nick Scott. Dave is calling me by name but I’m not sure who they are. The they said they were at Imms the other night. Oh man I’m thinking, did I get to much einsteinium and do something stupid. Dave said he knows me from reading the view. Nick came across the mush and tried to pull my machine out. No workey. Dave came over and hooked his machine on also. Several tries and both machines together were able to get me out. Dave had already hooked to the sled and pulled it out backwards. I’m thinking I sure hope one of them pulls it across the mush for me. They did. I all but got down on my knees and thanked them. They said just buy them a drink next time at Imms. There are a lot of good people out on the river. I’ll have to be sure to pay it forward. They went on ahead. We got the sled hooked back up and the dogs back in the kennel. It took us a while but when we got to the parking lot they were still hanging around to be sure we made it. Thanks again Dave and Nick!! Kari sure had a wild trip for the first one of the season.
Tuesday Feb 22
Today I have an appointment with the cardiologist to get scheduled for a nuclear stress test to get started on getting my FAA medical back
Wednesday Feb 23
Into Anchorage early to get a Covid test for my eye surgery tomorrow. I’ll put that in the next post. This one is getting way to long.
Thank you Lord for watching over us, especially when we are in a tough spot!
The View from the Outhouse 