Life in the January Woods
Lately our early morning temperatures have been around 18-degrees F (-7 C) and our daytime highs have been hovering just below freezing. I don’t think we’ve gone above 32-degrees (0 C) for at least a week now. While there were early reports of this winter being a big snow year for us here, we’ve yet to see all that much. Though we have seen a LOT of rain.
In a local news article I read recently, it stated from a new report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service that in the specific area we’re situated, the Lower Clark Fork Basin, we received 223% of normal precipitation in the month of December (which mostly fell as rain). But our snowpack is below normal, clocking in at 86% of our median. At this same time last year, our basin had a snowpack of 112%. (In case you’re interested, here’s the article from which this info hails.)
We are on a current roll of having blue skies and full sun, for at least part of the day, which has been a treat. Today, Sunday January 18, is the fifth day in a row we’ve enjoyed seeing the sun in all of its glory. If you’re not from around here, this may sound like no big deal. But locals know that our most frequent skyscape in the winter months, based on the well-known Missoula inversion that surrounds Missoula and areas around it due to our topography, is overcast and gray. And winters are long here. For many folks, the amount of cloudy days in winter here is a genuine hardship, which makes a lot of sense. I feel fortunate this isn’t the case for me. While I delight in the sun when we have it, the cloudy days don’t have a huge impact on me mood wise. I definitely notice an uptick in energy when we see the sun, but I flow along quite well with the grayness of winters here. I enjoy the rest, downtime and hibernation aspect of winters in Montana. They also suit me very well as a writer, poet, and book lover.
Mike has been working on the sauna build and things are moving slower than he was thinking or would prefer. But that’s how most building projects go. Things usually take longer than expected or desired. And when you’re milling your own lumber, and every board is a little different because you’re trying to make the very most of the wood and are highly keen on limiting waste, it adds another factor of challenge into the mix. It’s a time-consuming process to do the kind of work Mike is doing. Because he’s not just slapping up uniform kiln-dried boards we bought from Home Depot. He’s working with fresh lumber. He’s also not just a builder, he’s an artist. So it’s both a building and an art project he’s crafting.
A couple of newer things I’m feeling inclined to mention on the EM front are 1) we recently got a moisture meter to monitor the water content of our firewood and 2) we’re borrowing a portable satellite dish from my brother and sister-in-law to test out to see if we want to upgrade to satellite internet.
Okay. So one of the many things I’m still in the process of learning here at EM is the art of fire-making in our wood stove. And I do see it as an art. Turns out, and it makes sense, I’ve just never needed to think it about it before when living in town, that wood varies in its water content. The ideal moisture content for firewood is around 20% in order to burn well. Above that, the wood can be hard to light & keep lit & burns smokey, which adds more creosote to your chimney. Soft woods, like pine & fir, which is what we have around here, typically take 6-9 months to dry out well enough to burn most efficiently, assuming you cut it to the proper size, stack it well and keep it out of the rain. With the fresh cord of wood we purchased in November from a local guy down the road, we’re learning it wasn’t as seasoned as we wanted it to be. For next winter, we’ll look to purchase the wood earlier in the year so we can be sure it has a little more time to dry out before we put it to use. The wood we have has been working well enough, but sometimes I need to babysit it closely to make sure it stays active and doesn’t snuff out. Most days we average having 2 fires a day. I start one in the morning when I get up and then another one around when I start making dinner. Some days we have three, like today. One of the many boons of living in the small is that it doesn’t take much to heat things up. And Mike put great effort and thought into insulating our cabin super well, so we hold in heat pretty well.
On the satellite internet front, we’ve been considering getting starlink internet pretty much since we moved here in the summer of 2022. Mike’s been doing routine research into it for a long time. We’ve decided against it for a number of reasons, one of which is we weren’t sure it would even work without a fair amount of tree clearing, given how densely we’re socked in by the woods (the dish needs access to a certain amount of open sky). Another reason has to do with wanting to avoid acquiring another monthly bill (of which we have very few), and still another is the electricity draw it would require in order to run. (Did I mention we operate on solar panels and a generator and a fairy small battery system for our household electricity needs?). But so far the experiment to borrow the dish has been going really well, so we may look to get our own unit soon. We still have our cell booster antenna, which is what we’ve been using to get 4G to access the internet thus far, but we’re just on the cusp of having service out here. Even with our rather expensive, high-powered antenna our internet is limited, glitchy, and full of frustrations. Mike and I can only be online at the same time using the booster if one of us is hotspotting to the other. If the data on his phone is turned on (and it always is), I can’t turn on my data to hop online or make phone calls on my own accord. We don’t receive a strong enough signal to support two devices at the same time, unless one is hotspotting to the other. Anyway. It’s just a whole thing is what I’m saying.
So them there’s some updates. Oh! I almost forgot. I’ve been going on walkabouts in the woods and continuing to come across animal tracks in the snow, which is one of the great things about having snow. It has been such a delight. I’ve seen now what I think are bobcat tracks and also for sure turkey tracks. And recently my friend Terri and I saw dog tracks, which are either coyote or wolf. We did just have the great pleasure of hearing wolves howling two nights ago on Friday. Also, this was our spectacular sunset view from our cabin this past week on Tuesday:
