Snettisham
2022 - 1: A Hopeful Start
April
28 - 30
Port Snettisham
Photo Album
Port Snettisham
Photo Album
All around, it was a
full and
successful preparatory season for the start of summer. Beginning in
early March,
winter historical research gave way to planning, researching,
maintenance, and
purchasing items for the summer. I (so far) managed to fix the
bilge pump on the Ronquil by replacing the one piece of the system that
I didn't replace last year (the negative battery connector), made
endless plans with my mother for a dock system at the Taku, bought
stove pipe for the
new stove at Snettisham, installed permanent fenders and a rail in the
boathouse, bought a new canoe, and did a hundred other things. The
Ronquil
was launched last weekend and was already gassed and ready when Ezra
and I made two trips down Wednesday to load the stove, two bags of
linens, and other sundry items. Thursday dawned calm and sunny as
promised and my mom and I and the dogs were underway from the harbor
around 10:15, I dumping
rather a lot of my leaving-the-harbor beer into the channel in
gratitude for the good weather and hopeful start. Although the boat was
packed with spring gear, the dogs appeared perfectly comfortable in
their narrow corridor,
Cailey eschewing her usual dog bed (now elevated on half an inch of
rubber mat to keep it off wet decks) to lay on Mom's bags and my down
comforter on the back deck.
The mountains were gorgeous with their deep, sparkling white caps. We passed a large male sea lion in the middle of Taku Open, but otherwise Stephen's Passage was pretty quiet. ("Taku Open" is what I'm now called the Taku Inlet crossing based on Eliza Scidmore's 1884 name for it--a much more accurate description of this hazardous meeting of waterways, since Taku Inlet doesn't really start until the river side of Point Bishop, and most people don't cross that far up). A light following sea caught up with us and carried us south all the way to Sentinel Point, only causing me to slow occasionally. A whale made one breathing cycle at the entrance to the port, but we didn't see him again, though we stopped to use the bucket. Cailey didn't get off her nest on the back bench until we were approaching the homestead. It looked good from the beach! We arrived about half an hour before the high tide. My mom handed gear out to me to stash on the dry rocky path, then we awkwardly moved the cast iron wood stove in stages from the boat deck to the back bench to the rail to the ground, and then in stages up the beach to the porch, babying the feet that we'd discovered were a little loose on the way down to the boat. We hauled some of the gear to the lodge, then I went to anchor the boat while my mother tackled most of the rest. The sun was shining on my mom on the porch couch when I returned. Everything looked in order and I soon had the range pilots going and the newspapers off the windows. My mom set to sweeping the winter twigs and spruce cones off the deck. The diet sodas I'd left in the sink had exploded and left a mess on the window, wall, counter, and all the way to the side of the refrigerator, so I cleaned a little of it off with handy wipes. By then it was time for the ceremonial first quesadilla lunch which we ate on the porch with cold Pacificos from the cooler and the sunshine warm enough to remove a few layers. When we'd rested a bit, we decided it would be a good idea to tackle the wood stove, anticipating a cold April evening once the sun went down and not wanting to hook up the existing stove only to take it apart later. We had the whole afternoon, and it took more of it than I'd hoped. The first thing I discovered was that the new 6" stove pipe that I'd purchased for the new stove was in fact the same width as the existing system, so we debated using the existing stack and returning the new pieces to Ace Hardware. We soon decided to replace the inside section, half of which was quite rusty and the other half of which was too firmly attached to mess with. I wasn't entirely sure how to connect the two sides of the new stove pipe pieces (which come nested together, so not connected as a tube) and I recalled that I had some left over in the attic, so I clambered up there, finding it to be thicker pipe than the new pieces, matching the old. Connecting them proved to be very difficult and I suspect I would have needed to bend out the female side to make room for the male side, so soon turned back to the new pipe and succeeded in neatly connecting them. It wound up being a good choice all around.
But then the first problem--any combination of the 2' sections of new stack didn't line up with the hole in the wall (it was some inches short, but not nearly another 2' short). We first tried to bridge the gap by putting two 90 degree turns together (each of which has three or four sections which can be twisted to obtain any angle from 0 to 90), but it didn't get us quite far enough. I wound up cutting two pieces of new pipe to cover the distance (two because I measured the wrong distance the first time!). So finally we had the inside pieces working together, extending into the wall thimble (which was also the same size as the new wall thimble I'd purchased). At first I thought to reuse the whole outside segment of connecting stove pipe (2' horizontal plus the upright section and stack), but on investigation found the end of the horizontal piece had rusted badly from roof water hitting it. I separated the two sections and replaced the rotten one with a new pipe, reconnecting it with the old upright. When I got up on the ladder and tried to hold it in place while connecting it to the piece from the inside, I realized it was silly not to replace the whole thing, as the weight of the old pipe is unwieldy. I had the new pipe, why not use it? The elbow wasn't going to hold on its own, so I drilled holes and screwed it together; everything else was as yet unsecured. I also had to add my new cap to the top of the new stove pipe which was also a problem. Cute as it was, it didn't have the crimped male end that should have fit in the stove pipe below! How it was supposed to fit remains a mystery. I wound up using tin snips to very awkwardly make cuts in the top of the stack so I could bend them in until the cap fit over them. When it fell off on me as I was trying to put it up, I screwed them together. It looked good at the time but was later proven to be crooked. Functional though. In all it took four or five trips up the ladder before I was finally able to secure the stack as usual, connecting it to the piece inside (which my mother then connected to the rest of the system inside) and to the flashing with a metal tie. It was time to light the first fire--20 minutes at 250 degrees, per the instructions. I'm not sure who has the capacity to gage temperature like that in the kind of wilderness cabin to which this stove belongs, but we did our best and the wood burned very quietly while the lodge began to stink as the finish on the stove burnt off. The instructions also called for the fire to be built upsidedown--large wood on the bottom, tinder on the top. I split the difference.
Somewhere in the middle of what seemed like these endless little problems to fix (all irritating, but none substantial, small in retrospect), we took a break and headed to Harbor Seal with a load of gear and a drill, stopping on the way to take the tarp off of Schist House so we could steal the ladder it was attached to. My mom helped hold the little smoke stack on the side of the cabin while I screwed it into place. I'd opened up the oil line and was pleased to see that the oil pan had a nice pool of diesel in it when we were done. We made the bed and returned to the lodge to finish the stove. With those major chores done, we finally relaxed on the porch for a bit while a male hummingbird (Clive) enjoyed the feeders I'd put out earlier. I had planned a more interested dinner, but wound up heating up Indian food with toast, being fairly exhausted by that time, discouraged by the mess in the kitchen, the clutter of all the gear and tools strewn about, and the lack of running water. We headed to Hermit Thrush at 8:00, quite cozy with the fire I'd lit before dinner, watched a couple of Parks and Rec episodes, I read for a bit, and we went to sleep.
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I woke up around 6:30 and despaired of getting back to sleep, but managed to doze off again until we all woke up at 8:00. I wasn't sure how two humans and two dogs would do on the bed, but Cailey slept between my mom and I and Jenny slept at our feet perfectly all night. Just before we got up, the dogs switched places so Jenny could get some morning cuddles (Cailey got hers from the floor later) and then we threw our cold clothes on and headed into the day. My mom had coffee and lit the second fire (in theory, 20 minutes at 500 degrees) while I grabbed dish gloves and a hoe and headed for the olive barrel. On the way, I closed the valves to the cabins and found that the upper cabin valve was covered in about a foot of limbs and moss from a massive branch collapse from the huge dead spruce above it. I could see pipe on either side, maybe 25 feet apart, but nothing in the middle. I carefully moved one branch and clump of moss after another until I first found the valve and then traced my way along much of the rest of the pipe, including the splice that has given me so much trouble in the past. To my amazement, I found no damage, so left the rest of the detritus alone. Better bear protection anyway.
Up at the creek I labored to clear big rocks from the barrel's (future) pool, scraped endless hoefulls of gravel down the falls, then off to the side, build a dam over the side channel, etc., etc., until I felt I had a deep enough pool for the barrel, which was rolled into place. Then I built up the dam behind it in rock, throwing handfuls of sand and gravel against it until it held water. The pool looked good, the outlet pipe well underwater. The creek is high now, but hopefully this will be sufficient in low water too. To help prevent outbursts like last year, I left channels between the barrel side of the waterfall and the other side and didn't build up the dam on that side so high so excess water can hopefully flow over there rather than destroy my dam. To my great satisfaction, water was already gushing through the pipe at the first valve as well as down at the hose valve at the lodge. I hooked up the lodge sink (awkward because I hadn't disconnected the drain pipe, which I realized later), installed the filters, and we had running water. I quickly cleaned the sink and surrounding area before eating some oatmeal and joining my mom on the porch with a cup of jasmine tea, escaping the awful smell of the heating stove. I think it was about 10:30 by then.
And with that success and the tea and the sun on the meadow, the birds appeared. In short order, a junco (always unusual here), fox sparrow, and Lincoln's sparrow appeared, multiple hummingbirds were zooming about and courting including at least one female (three or more were around by the afternoon), a small flock of American pipits were working the grass and the beach, ruby-crowned kinglets were feeding back and forth in front of us and singing occasionally, a varied thrush was foraging near the little stream downriver, and two robins fed in the meadow, one of them a very pale female, perhaps my friend from years past! A whale entered the inlet and made a couple of breathing cycles near the mouth of the main channel and we saw him fluke there once, then not again. And to my great relief, grebes sat in the river, though even with spotting scope they were hard to see well. There was also a loon and other spring birds on the river, all rather difficult to see in the brilliance of the sun and the distance. The spring birds I was so hoping to show my mother had manifested! A varied thrush, perhaps the same one that was working the stream, perched in the alder downriver and serenaded us for a long time with a wide range of vocalizations from the typical bold song to warbles and purrs and soft calls. It was a very pleasant morning followed by more quesadillas (after a cup of cafe francais to chase my delightful tea).
After lunch I tackled a task I was anxious about for the potential disappointment and discouragement: internet. I quietly set up the ladder (well, not so quietly as it scraped through the brush), grabbed screwdriver and grease, wrench and radio, and attached everything to the dish in short order. I turned on the power inside, all still tidily set up, plugged in the network cable, and waited. Nothing indicated internet on my computer. I went to the hughesnet page and was relieved to find a green system light, and all the lights were on on the modem. In the end, I just needed to be patient. My phone actually picked up wifi before my browser worked on the laptop, and in the end everything worked perfectly, without a hitch. I had internet. And with so little work, no hassles, just good, clean internet! And, weirdly, I got texts and even apparently sent one!? What a relief.
At that point I was thinking about raking the trails, but my mom was sniffing around the fridge and so I stayed to help with that. We pulled it out, she read through the manual I'd printed (happy to find that it included my model), and we found our way around the gas tubing and the burner on the back. She could see the spark when I tried to start it, but even after waiting a very long time to let gas get through the long-dormant pipe, it just wouldn't start. We figured it was a fuel problem--in the regulator, the main hose from the outside, or the tiny copper tubing from there to the burner. We found a couple of brushes attached to the back which looked promising for cleaning them out. The first thing we did was unhook the fuel hose from the back of the fridge, turn the gas on at the tank, and see if I smelled anything. I did not (I have the keener nose). Then we unhooked the regulator and hose from the tank and separated the hose from the regulator. The regulator smelled of gas, the hose did not. A clue. My mom blew through the hose while I listened from the inside; it made a loud whistling sound and she thought she felt resistance at first. She did that a number of times, then we reattached the hose to the regulator and the regulator to the tank and, this time, the gas smell was strong all the way through. It was a good sign. Before we hooked it back to the fridge, my mom tried to clean out the copper tube. The brush was too thick for it, so she used a long twisty tie as far as the first 90 degree turn. She also brushed off the fins on the back before we reattached the gas hose. Again we allowed some time for gas to flow, then started the lighting process again. And it lit! It lit! And immediately died because my mom's excited exclamation scared me, but it started right back up again and this time I held the primer down longer until it held. A nice, almost solid blue flame burned brightly in the back. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
And with that at least partial success, I headed out to rake. My mom helped me fold up the tarp at Schist House, then I managed to rake all the paths around the property (except the new loop) in about an hour. It was the last spring project, which was fantastic, but I was exhausted. Also a little disappointed that after an hour there was no sign that the fridge was cooling. But it was 4:00 and I was whooped, so we had wine on the porch in the gorgeous evening as the sun slipped behind the mountain next to us. After another pleasant hour on the porch, I chopped some vegetables and sliced some bison for dinner, leaving the latter to marinate while we went for a walk upriver on the low tide. Bonaparte's and mew gulls dominated the flats in the distance and we saw savanna sparrows (another spring migrant passing through) on the beach. At the grassy point, I turned around and hastened back to the lodge to start dinner--Zataran's yellow rice with fresh vegetables and stir fried bison in Thai sauce to make a fusion rice bowl that was pretty decent. We opted to head to Hermit Thrush early again, arriving at 8:00 for an episode of Taskmaster and another Parks and Rec before sleep. This time the dogs were not quite so cooperative to begin with, occupying a narrow space between the two of us with the occasional growl from Jenny and leaving two large open spaces at the foot of the bed.
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But they slept soundly all night and we didn't get up until Cailey turned over and stuck her snout in my mom's sleeping bag. It was 8:00 on the dot again. This time we had a more leisurely morning, having toast and oatmeal inside while checking the weather. To my amazement and delight, the fridge was cold and I stocked it with overwintered beers from the porch, but I didn't say anything to my mom. The weather was looking favorable today, not so favorable tomorrow, but when we started our morning COASST walk, a fierce north wind was blowing down the river, cold and unpleasant, masking the sounds of birds from the forest and setting me on edge. I'd been excited to make my first eBird survey at Snettisham, but the chill and noise of the wind--coupled with the low water on the river, drawing the ducks and gulls far away--discouraged me. I did see a large flock of Arctic terns diving on the river and, on the way back, we hugged the shore and were rewarded with more savanna sparrows and a stunning look at a male Townsend's warbler foraging in the trees over the beach, yellow head shining in the sun. Behind the grassy point, a lot of crow activity in the trees suggest group nesting activity there, something to keep an eye on. Back at the lodge, I detoured to check on the status of the second Taku cottonwood, which is bent from snow (presumably, like Nigel Cottonwood had in the beginning) but budding nicely.
We spent the rest of the morning on the porch--me working on this trip report and my mother reading, both of us making frequent stops to watch the scratching fox sparrow, the diving hummingbirds, the mysterious streaky bird with the dark malars and parallel dark streaks on either side of a pale throat, etc. The sun didn't hit the porch until after I'd washed the dishes, filled the hummingbird feeders, and had lunch. As I sliced a cucumber and havarti for sandwiches, my mom (right on queue) asked if she could get a beer and I said, "Sure, grab a couple from the fridge." I had that locked and loaded. "Do you mean the cooler or fridge...?" she asked. "You heard me," I said. She had helped me nudge it back into place that morning (metering out the hose from outside as I pushed it back), but she had never checked the temp herself. She was at least as elated as I was! We ate our sandwiches with ice cold Pacificos on the porch, delighted. After chasing down the mystery bird, I used my momentum to plant potatoes in the meadow. I used the existing pot for Tlingit potatoes, leaving it in its current position on the side of the path and adding decaying beach grass and seaweed to its contents. I put the commercial potatoes in the new pot with only wrack grass/seaweed/leaves. I think it'll work well, but we'll see, IF the bears leave it alone. I put a couple of rocks in the bottom to help stabilize it and put it under the little spruce tree on the water side, but I expect it will still be a target. While my mom and Jenny went for a walk to the olive barrel, I swept the boardwalks and clipped the devil's club and salmonberry stalks that were overhanging the main boardwalk, presumably from winter snows.
And then I checked the weather again, which continued to promise a decent southeasterly the next day with no immediate end in sight, the edge of a gale in the Gulf. It was a tough decision to make. Having just finished all the chores and with unhindered rest and birdwatching and fun in store, I really didn't want to leave. But things always look a bit more promising in the sun. How would I feel the next day closing up in the rain (near 100% chance all the day long) and taking everyone home over wind-whipped seas all the way up Stephen's Passage? The point-specific marine forecast for that day, generally so accurate, continued to call for variable winds, with 1' seas in Taku Inlet. The vicious wind from up the Whiting had diminished somewhat, and I recall that the AWC team from two years before had crossed Taku Open with no problem while a similar wind came down the river, so I was leaning toward trusting the forecast instead of paying attention to local conditions and what that suggested for the Taku. It was 1:50 and high tide and I decided to call it, reluctantly. An hour later, we were packed up, the lodge was clean, the cameras set up, Hermit Thrush locked up, gear at the water's edge, everything ship shape and ready for the next trip. We drank two more ice cold beers on the porch while watching hummingbirds pulling small fibers from the clump of cotton I'd twisty-tied to a current stalk. They didn't seem to take them away, just perched nearby and eventually dropped the cotton, but it was a good sign. At 3:30 I went for the boat and we were soon loaded up, underway shortly before 4:00. A whale blew in the entrance to the port, but we only saw it once. To my dis-ease, a powerful wind was coming into Gilbert Bay from the Speel side, but when we reached Stephen's Passage, the chop was coming from Admiralty like it was a NW wind. I didn't voice my hopes, but I was suspecting/hoping that we wouldn't hit any real seas until we were past Arden and in the trough coming from the back side of Douglas. Alas, I was wrong. The seas were reasonable until Grave Point, which we reached in less than an hour, and it looked like we might be on track to arrive home around 6:00 as I'd predicted (and sent as much via wifi texting to Ezra, which it turns out is a thing I can do now). Instead, the seas built as we trundled our way into the Open, slowing us to an agonizingly slow pace while we were knocked about by trios of tight three foot seas and endless ragged waves which soaked everything on the boat behind us and kept the windshield awash in salt spray. It had been so hot and pleasant when we'd left that I hadn't put Cailey's coat on, but she was soon wet and miserable and the rest of us up front weren't much better. The sun had hidden behind a high haze, though the view of Devil's Paw up the river was spectacular. We fought and suffered for an hour before we reached Point Arden; the seas had laid down just shy of it, which was unusual, and of course continued to improve as we neared the channel. There we hit some mild Taku winds crossing the channel and sought shelter on the mainland side, encountering little seas off Sheep Creek and Basin on the way in. A rainbow halo around the sun over Douglas was a novel sight. We went under the bridge about 6:45, chilled and weary. In terms of weather, I believe I did make the wrong choice and I wouldn't have gone out if I'd known what Taku Inlet was like. Now as I write this the next morning, it is raining as promised but the branches are only lightly waving and I think it would have been a better trip today, with a morning around the new wood stove to fuel us. But that's the nature of traveling in this unpredictable land--you make mistakes in both directions! And we can't deny that it was a wildly successful opening and the place will be in awesome shape when I return.
The mountains were gorgeous with their deep, sparkling white caps. We passed a large male sea lion in the middle of Taku Open, but otherwise Stephen's Passage was pretty quiet. ("Taku Open" is what I'm now called the Taku Inlet crossing based on Eliza Scidmore's 1884 name for it--a much more accurate description of this hazardous meeting of waterways, since Taku Inlet doesn't really start until the river side of Point Bishop, and most people don't cross that far up). A light following sea caught up with us and carried us south all the way to Sentinel Point, only causing me to slow occasionally. A whale made one breathing cycle at the entrance to the port, but we didn't see him again, though we stopped to use the bucket. Cailey didn't get off her nest on the back bench until we were approaching the homestead. It looked good from the beach! We arrived about half an hour before the high tide. My mom handed gear out to me to stash on the dry rocky path, then we awkwardly moved the cast iron wood stove in stages from the boat deck to the back bench to the rail to the ground, and then in stages up the beach to the porch, babying the feet that we'd discovered were a little loose on the way down to the boat. We hauled some of the gear to the lodge, then I went to anchor the boat while my mother tackled most of the rest. The sun was shining on my mom on the porch couch when I returned. Everything looked in order and I soon had the range pilots going and the newspapers off the windows. My mom set to sweeping the winter twigs and spruce cones off the deck. The diet sodas I'd left in the sink had exploded and left a mess on the window, wall, counter, and all the way to the side of the refrigerator, so I cleaned a little of it off with handy wipes. By then it was time for the ceremonial first quesadilla lunch which we ate on the porch with cold Pacificos from the cooler and the sunshine warm enough to remove a few layers. When we'd rested a bit, we decided it would be a good idea to tackle the wood stove, anticipating a cold April evening once the sun went down and not wanting to hook up the existing stove only to take it apart later. We had the whole afternoon, and it took more of it than I'd hoped. The first thing I discovered was that the new 6" stove pipe that I'd purchased for the new stove was in fact the same width as the existing system, so we debated using the existing stack and returning the new pieces to Ace Hardware. We soon decided to replace the inside section, half of which was quite rusty and the other half of which was too firmly attached to mess with. I wasn't entirely sure how to connect the two sides of the new stove pipe pieces (which come nested together, so not connected as a tube) and I recalled that I had some left over in the attic, so I clambered up there, finding it to be thicker pipe than the new pieces, matching the old. Connecting them proved to be very difficult and I suspect I would have needed to bend out the female side to make room for the male side, so soon turned back to the new pipe and succeeded in neatly connecting them. It wound up being a good choice all around.
But then the first problem--any combination of the 2' sections of new stack didn't line up with the hole in the wall (it was some inches short, but not nearly another 2' short). We first tried to bridge the gap by putting two 90 degree turns together (each of which has three or four sections which can be twisted to obtain any angle from 0 to 90), but it didn't get us quite far enough. I wound up cutting two pieces of new pipe to cover the distance (two because I measured the wrong distance the first time!). So finally we had the inside pieces working together, extending into the wall thimble (which was also the same size as the new wall thimble I'd purchased). At first I thought to reuse the whole outside segment of connecting stove pipe (2' horizontal plus the upright section and stack), but on investigation found the end of the horizontal piece had rusted badly from roof water hitting it. I separated the two sections and replaced the rotten one with a new pipe, reconnecting it with the old upright. When I got up on the ladder and tried to hold it in place while connecting it to the piece from the inside, I realized it was silly not to replace the whole thing, as the weight of the old pipe is unwieldy. I had the new pipe, why not use it? The elbow wasn't going to hold on its own, so I drilled holes and screwed it together; everything else was as yet unsecured. I also had to add my new cap to the top of the new stove pipe which was also a problem. Cute as it was, it didn't have the crimped male end that should have fit in the stove pipe below! How it was supposed to fit remains a mystery. I wound up using tin snips to very awkwardly make cuts in the top of the stack so I could bend them in until the cap fit over them. When it fell off on me as I was trying to put it up, I screwed them together. It looked good at the time but was later proven to be crooked. Functional though. In all it took four or five trips up the ladder before I was finally able to secure the stack as usual, connecting it to the piece inside (which my mother then connected to the rest of the system inside) and to the flashing with a metal tie. It was time to light the first fire--20 minutes at 250 degrees, per the instructions. I'm not sure who has the capacity to gage temperature like that in the kind of wilderness cabin to which this stove belongs, but we did our best and the wood burned very quietly while the lodge began to stink as the finish on the stove burnt off. The instructions also called for the fire to be built upsidedown--large wood on the bottom, tinder on the top. I split the difference.
Somewhere in the middle of what seemed like these endless little problems to fix (all irritating, but none substantial, small in retrospect), we took a break and headed to Harbor Seal with a load of gear and a drill, stopping on the way to take the tarp off of Schist House so we could steal the ladder it was attached to. My mom helped hold the little smoke stack on the side of the cabin while I screwed it into place. I'd opened up the oil line and was pleased to see that the oil pan had a nice pool of diesel in it when we were done. We made the bed and returned to the lodge to finish the stove. With those major chores done, we finally relaxed on the porch for a bit while a male hummingbird (Clive) enjoyed the feeders I'd put out earlier. I had planned a more interested dinner, but wound up heating up Indian food with toast, being fairly exhausted by that time, discouraged by the mess in the kitchen, the clutter of all the gear and tools strewn about, and the lack of running water. We headed to Hermit Thrush at 8:00, quite cozy with the fire I'd lit before dinner, watched a couple of Parks and Rec episodes, I read for a bit, and we went to sleep.
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I woke up around 6:30 and despaired of getting back to sleep, but managed to doze off again until we all woke up at 8:00. I wasn't sure how two humans and two dogs would do on the bed, but Cailey slept between my mom and I and Jenny slept at our feet perfectly all night. Just before we got up, the dogs switched places so Jenny could get some morning cuddles (Cailey got hers from the floor later) and then we threw our cold clothes on and headed into the day. My mom had coffee and lit the second fire (in theory, 20 minutes at 500 degrees) while I grabbed dish gloves and a hoe and headed for the olive barrel. On the way, I closed the valves to the cabins and found that the upper cabin valve was covered in about a foot of limbs and moss from a massive branch collapse from the huge dead spruce above it. I could see pipe on either side, maybe 25 feet apart, but nothing in the middle. I carefully moved one branch and clump of moss after another until I first found the valve and then traced my way along much of the rest of the pipe, including the splice that has given me so much trouble in the past. To my amazement, I found no damage, so left the rest of the detritus alone. Better bear protection anyway.
Up at the creek I labored to clear big rocks from the barrel's (future) pool, scraped endless hoefulls of gravel down the falls, then off to the side, build a dam over the side channel, etc., etc., until I felt I had a deep enough pool for the barrel, which was rolled into place. Then I built up the dam behind it in rock, throwing handfuls of sand and gravel against it until it held water. The pool looked good, the outlet pipe well underwater. The creek is high now, but hopefully this will be sufficient in low water too. To help prevent outbursts like last year, I left channels between the barrel side of the waterfall and the other side and didn't build up the dam on that side so high so excess water can hopefully flow over there rather than destroy my dam. To my great satisfaction, water was already gushing through the pipe at the first valve as well as down at the hose valve at the lodge. I hooked up the lodge sink (awkward because I hadn't disconnected the drain pipe, which I realized later), installed the filters, and we had running water. I quickly cleaned the sink and surrounding area before eating some oatmeal and joining my mom on the porch with a cup of jasmine tea, escaping the awful smell of the heating stove. I think it was about 10:30 by then.
And with that success and the tea and the sun on the meadow, the birds appeared. In short order, a junco (always unusual here), fox sparrow, and Lincoln's sparrow appeared, multiple hummingbirds were zooming about and courting including at least one female (three or more were around by the afternoon), a small flock of American pipits were working the grass and the beach, ruby-crowned kinglets were feeding back and forth in front of us and singing occasionally, a varied thrush was foraging near the little stream downriver, and two robins fed in the meadow, one of them a very pale female, perhaps my friend from years past! A whale entered the inlet and made a couple of breathing cycles near the mouth of the main channel and we saw him fluke there once, then not again. And to my great relief, grebes sat in the river, though even with spotting scope they were hard to see well. There was also a loon and other spring birds on the river, all rather difficult to see in the brilliance of the sun and the distance. The spring birds I was so hoping to show my mother had manifested! A varied thrush, perhaps the same one that was working the stream, perched in the alder downriver and serenaded us for a long time with a wide range of vocalizations from the typical bold song to warbles and purrs and soft calls. It was a very pleasant morning followed by more quesadillas (after a cup of cafe francais to chase my delightful tea).
After lunch I tackled a task I was anxious about for the potential disappointment and discouragement: internet. I quietly set up the ladder (well, not so quietly as it scraped through the brush), grabbed screwdriver and grease, wrench and radio, and attached everything to the dish in short order. I turned on the power inside, all still tidily set up, plugged in the network cable, and waited. Nothing indicated internet on my computer. I went to the hughesnet page and was relieved to find a green system light, and all the lights were on on the modem. In the end, I just needed to be patient. My phone actually picked up wifi before my browser worked on the laptop, and in the end everything worked perfectly, without a hitch. I had internet. And with so little work, no hassles, just good, clean internet! And, weirdly, I got texts and even apparently sent one!? What a relief.
At that point I was thinking about raking the trails, but my mom was sniffing around the fridge and so I stayed to help with that. We pulled it out, she read through the manual I'd printed (happy to find that it included my model), and we found our way around the gas tubing and the burner on the back. She could see the spark when I tried to start it, but even after waiting a very long time to let gas get through the long-dormant pipe, it just wouldn't start. We figured it was a fuel problem--in the regulator, the main hose from the outside, or the tiny copper tubing from there to the burner. We found a couple of brushes attached to the back which looked promising for cleaning them out. The first thing we did was unhook the fuel hose from the back of the fridge, turn the gas on at the tank, and see if I smelled anything. I did not (I have the keener nose). Then we unhooked the regulator and hose from the tank and separated the hose from the regulator. The regulator smelled of gas, the hose did not. A clue. My mom blew through the hose while I listened from the inside; it made a loud whistling sound and she thought she felt resistance at first. She did that a number of times, then we reattached the hose to the regulator and the regulator to the tank and, this time, the gas smell was strong all the way through. It was a good sign. Before we hooked it back to the fridge, my mom tried to clean out the copper tube. The brush was too thick for it, so she used a long twisty tie as far as the first 90 degree turn. She also brushed off the fins on the back before we reattached the gas hose. Again we allowed some time for gas to flow, then started the lighting process again. And it lit! It lit! And immediately died because my mom's excited exclamation scared me, but it started right back up again and this time I held the primer down longer until it held. A nice, almost solid blue flame burned brightly in the back. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
And with that at least partial success, I headed out to rake. My mom helped me fold up the tarp at Schist House, then I managed to rake all the paths around the property (except the new loop) in about an hour. It was the last spring project, which was fantastic, but I was exhausted. Also a little disappointed that after an hour there was no sign that the fridge was cooling. But it was 4:00 and I was whooped, so we had wine on the porch in the gorgeous evening as the sun slipped behind the mountain next to us. After another pleasant hour on the porch, I chopped some vegetables and sliced some bison for dinner, leaving the latter to marinate while we went for a walk upriver on the low tide. Bonaparte's and mew gulls dominated the flats in the distance and we saw savanna sparrows (another spring migrant passing through) on the beach. At the grassy point, I turned around and hastened back to the lodge to start dinner--Zataran's yellow rice with fresh vegetables and stir fried bison in Thai sauce to make a fusion rice bowl that was pretty decent. We opted to head to Hermit Thrush early again, arriving at 8:00 for an episode of Taskmaster and another Parks and Rec before sleep. This time the dogs were not quite so cooperative to begin with, occupying a narrow space between the two of us with the occasional growl from Jenny and leaving two large open spaces at the foot of the bed.
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But they slept soundly all night and we didn't get up until Cailey turned over and stuck her snout in my mom's sleeping bag. It was 8:00 on the dot again. This time we had a more leisurely morning, having toast and oatmeal inside while checking the weather. To my amazement and delight, the fridge was cold and I stocked it with overwintered beers from the porch, but I didn't say anything to my mom. The weather was looking favorable today, not so favorable tomorrow, but when we started our morning COASST walk, a fierce north wind was blowing down the river, cold and unpleasant, masking the sounds of birds from the forest and setting me on edge. I'd been excited to make my first eBird survey at Snettisham, but the chill and noise of the wind--coupled with the low water on the river, drawing the ducks and gulls far away--discouraged me. I did see a large flock of Arctic terns diving on the river and, on the way back, we hugged the shore and were rewarded with more savanna sparrows and a stunning look at a male Townsend's warbler foraging in the trees over the beach, yellow head shining in the sun. Behind the grassy point, a lot of crow activity in the trees suggest group nesting activity there, something to keep an eye on. Back at the lodge, I detoured to check on the status of the second Taku cottonwood, which is bent from snow (presumably, like Nigel Cottonwood had in the beginning) but budding nicely.
We spent the rest of the morning on the porch--me working on this trip report and my mother reading, both of us making frequent stops to watch the scratching fox sparrow, the diving hummingbirds, the mysterious streaky bird with the dark malars and parallel dark streaks on either side of a pale throat, etc. The sun didn't hit the porch until after I'd washed the dishes, filled the hummingbird feeders, and had lunch. As I sliced a cucumber and havarti for sandwiches, my mom (right on queue) asked if she could get a beer and I said, "Sure, grab a couple from the fridge." I had that locked and loaded. "Do you mean the cooler or fridge...?" she asked. "You heard me," I said. She had helped me nudge it back into place that morning (metering out the hose from outside as I pushed it back), but she had never checked the temp herself. She was at least as elated as I was! We ate our sandwiches with ice cold Pacificos on the porch, delighted. After chasing down the mystery bird, I used my momentum to plant potatoes in the meadow. I used the existing pot for Tlingit potatoes, leaving it in its current position on the side of the path and adding decaying beach grass and seaweed to its contents. I put the commercial potatoes in the new pot with only wrack grass/seaweed/leaves. I think it'll work well, but we'll see, IF the bears leave it alone. I put a couple of rocks in the bottom to help stabilize it and put it under the little spruce tree on the water side, but I expect it will still be a target. While my mom and Jenny went for a walk to the olive barrel, I swept the boardwalks and clipped the devil's club and salmonberry stalks that were overhanging the main boardwalk, presumably from winter snows.
And then I checked the weather again, which continued to promise a decent southeasterly the next day with no immediate end in sight, the edge of a gale in the Gulf. It was a tough decision to make. Having just finished all the chores and with unhindered rest and birdwatching and fun in store, I really didn't want to leave. But things always look a bit more promising in the sun. How would I feel the next day closing up in the rain (near 100% chance all the day long) and taking everyone home over wind-whipped seas all the way up Stephen's Passage? The point-specific marine forecast for that day, generally so accurate, continued to call for variable winds, with 1' seas in Taku Inlet. The vicious wind from up the Whiting had diminished somewhat, and I recall that the AWC team from two years before had crossed Taku Open with no problem while a similar wind came down the river, so I was leaning toward trusting the forecast instead of paying attention to local conditions and what that suggested for the Taku. It was 1:50 and high tide and I decided to call it, reluctantly. An hour later, we were packed up, the lodge was clean, the cameras set up, Hermit Thrush locked up, gear at the water's edge, everything ship shape and ready for the next trip. We drank two more ice cold beers on the porch while watching hummingbirds pulling small fibers from the clump of cotton I'd twisty-tied to a current stalk. They didn't seem to take them away, just perched nearby and eventually dropped the cotton, but it was a good sign. At 3:30 I went for the boat and we were soon loaded up, underway shortly before 4:00. A whale blew in the entrance to the port, but we only saw it once. To my dis-ease, a powerful wind was coming into Gilbert Bay from the Speel side, but when we reached Stephen's Passage, the chop was coming from Admiralty like it was a NW wind. I didn't voice my hopes, but I was suspecting/hoping that we wouldn't hit any real seas until we were past Arden and in the trough coming from the back side of Douglas. Alas, I was wrong. The seas were reasonable until Grave Point, which we reached in less than an hour, and it looked like we might be on track to arrive home around 6:00 as I'd predicted (and sent as much via wifi texting to Ezra, which it turns out is a thing I can do now). Instead, the seas built as we trundled our way into the Open, slowing us to an agonizingly slow pace while we were knocked about by trios of tight three foot seas and endless ragged waves which soaked everything on the boat behind us and kept the windshield awash in salt spray. It had been so hot and pleasant when we'd left that I hadn't put Cailey's coat on, but she was soon wet and miserable and the rest of us up front weren't much better. The sun had hidden behind a high haze, though the view of Devil's Paw up the river was spectacular. We fought and suffered for an hour before we reached Point Arden; the seas had laid down just shy of it, which was unusual, and of course continued to improve as we neared the channel. There we hit some mild Taku winds crossing the channel and sought shelter on the mainland side, encountering little seas off Sheep Creek and Basin on the way in. A rainbow halo around the sun over Douglas was a novel sight. We went under the bridge about 6:45, chilled and weary. In terms of weather, I believe I did make the wrong choice and I wouldn't have gone out if I'd known what Taku Inlet was like. Now as I write this the next morning, it is raining as promised but the branches are only lightly waving and I think it would have been a better trip today, with a morning around the new wood stove to fuel us. But that's the nature of traveling in this unpredictable land--you make mistakes in both directions! And we can't deny that it was a wildly successful opening and the place will be in awesome shape when I return.
Spring sky