“Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Walks
We are at our mountain cabin for a bit of vacation. The cabin is remote, powered by the sun. But, we have a few luxuries like satellite TV and (finally) satellite Internet. Still, there is not much to do other than a few chores around the place, reading, putting together puzzles, talking, and walking.
We take a couple of walks a day. Some walks are on the roads here, which are decomposed granite. With each step you hear “crunch, crunch, crunch”. There is not much else to hear other than the birds and the wind through the trees. Often, we just walk along side-by-side saying nothing, just listening to the crunching sound of our feet.
Other walks are through the woods. These can be nearly silent until you step on a stick and “SNAP!” The woods range from the “deep dark woods”—mostly pine and fir trees, very dense, with a pine needle carpet underneath, to the meadows of tall, green grass, a babbling brook, and aspen trees so big and old that I cannot wrap my arms around them.
Lynne just reminded me of a third kind of walk—the “sage walk.” We have a lot of high prairie land that is just covered in sage brush. This time of the year, it is covered with a wide variety of wildflowers too. Walking through this can be challenging. First, you have to weave through the dense sage, picking a path between bushes. Someone tracking the walk from a distance would think we were stumbling around randomly. And, it is tough to walk because we don’t want to step on the wildflowers. So, between weaving through the sage and avoiding the flowers, a sage walk can be more challenging than climbing the hills or navigating the deep, dark woods.
Here we are on a “crunchy” walk.
The dogs like to go on walks, of course. Alex and Hailey, our two remaining Berners are very good on walks. They don’t range far and they come when called. We’ve had others like Bart and Bode who liked to “go walkabout” and disappear completely for long periods of time, to stragglers like Daisy and Milli. Milli would accompany us on the first part of a walk and then take a shortcut home only to be waiting for us, flat on her back, in the driveway when we returned. Daisy liked to follow Lynne, literally stepping on her heels at times.
Walks are great times for “getting back to nature”. Especially if we stop walking for a while and just stand there and look around. The details we see on a walk are inversely proportional to the speed of the walk. I guess all of life is like that. The faster we go, the sooner we accomplish our goal, but we see very little of what is really going on in the world around us. The slower we go, the more likely we are to see a new wildflower, hear the song of the Hermit Thrush for the first time this year, see the old Horned Owl fly through the dense forest, find a rare and tasty mushroom.
Walks are a refreshing mixture of memories, sights, sounds, and spiritual renewal. At 8600 feet in hilly country, they are good exercise too!
Posted under: Cabin News • by Rick on 06/21/2008 at 12:07 PM
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Saturday, January 14, 2006
Wind Turbine Experiment
When we stay at the cabin and the wind blows at speeds greater than about 40 mph, our wind turbine make a lot of noise. The vendor (Bergey) calls it “fluttering”, but that is a kind word for it. It sounds like a helicopter landing on our roof. This happens because the wind turbine is designed to “furl” at high winds in order to protect itself. When it furls, it actually turns sideways into the wind to get the propellers out of the direct wind and slow them down. At low speeds this is not a problem, you don’t even notice. But, at high speeds it make a tremendous noise.
So, I’ve programmed the wind turbine controller to put it into “slow mode” when the batteries reach 27V. Thus, the wind will never fully charge the batteries (which need to get to 28.8V or so), but will begin to dump any current to a load in the crawlspace—warming it up nicely—when the batteries are above 27V and it is windy. However, above 27V the wind turbine controller will also slow down the rpm of the turbine to about 120 rpm regardless of the wind. Now, if high winds cause a furl, it won’t make noise.
There are several implications of this experiment:
1. The wind turbine will not contribute to battery charging above 27V. I will rely totally on the sun for full charging. So, I may not get a full charge as often, and there is some risk of running the batteries down during a series of cloudy days, even if the wind is blowing. (But, they will still get charged to 27V, which isn’t bad.)
2. It will be much quieter in high winds, as long as the batteries are in pretty good shape. And, when it does get noisy, it won’t last as long because the wind turbine will kick off at 27V.
I’ve run the system like this all day—it is sunny but very windy—and it seems to be working perfectly.
Posted under: Cabin News • by Rick on 01/14/2006 at 01:28 PM
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Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Christmas at the Cabin, Day 12
The wind blew hard all night and was still blowing hard on Monday morning. We got up and did our morning chores: make coffee, feed dogs, feed birds, build fire, etc.
Then, we started packing up for the trip home. The biggest, and saddest, chore was to take down the Christmas tree. I did that while Lynne organized all our other stuff. We were soon packed and ready to head home with a goal of getting home early and having the day to get unpacked and back into the routine at home. We were able to bring most of our stuff home, but I had to leave a lot of trash (in trash bags) in the shed. I’ll need to make a trip up sometime soon and do a “de-provisioning” trip to bring some of that stuff, plus empty boxes, and empty wine bottles home 
I learned a few lessons on this stay:
1. Muskrats can be cranky and aggressive. That “muskrat love” stuff is bogus.
2. Snow fleas exist. And, may be the most common life on earth!
3. The wind blows in winter. (Well, I knew this, but experienced the highest winds I’ve ever seen up there).
4. There is no problem getting enough electricity in winter if the wind is blowing.
5. Lynne and I can be together 24X7 in a small one-room cabin with 7 dogs and 3 cats and live to tell about it.
6. We broke 2 records on this stay: the longest continuous stay ever at 12 days, and the longest stay ever without a trip into town.
We hope you enjoyed keeping up with our stay at the cabin and welcome any comments.
Posted under: Cabin News • by Rick on 01/03/2006 at 09:43 AM
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Christmas at the Cabin, Day 11, Part Two
After our walk “around” this morning, Lynne made some Salmon Tartare which we ate on toast as a lunch/snack. It was, as usually, excellent. And, we drank a bottle of Chateau-Grillet wine with it. This is a very fascinating wine. It has its own appellation controlée in France. In other words, there is only one vintner for this wine! And, it is a while wine from the area of the Rhone valley that is famous for hearty red wines. Lynne bought six bottles of the 1990 vintage back in 1992. We were going to drink one bottle every Christmas for 6 years, but ended up not following that tradition. We still have three bottles left…well, two now. It was a fantastic wine given it is a white wine that is 16 years old! Yum.
I drove over to Larry and Donna’s to make sure they knew we were staying an extra day, that we did not need help getting out, and to pay for getting us in last week.
The wind was not too bad today and we just had a lazy day around the cabin.
I started preparing the Beef Bourguignon a little after noon and it cooked all afternoon at a simmer on the wood stove. We had an early dinner of the beef with some roasted potatoes and drank a 1991 Drouhin Pinot Noir from Oregon. The story behind this wine is fascinating, but I won’t go into that here. The short version is that a pinot noir wine from the Wilamette valley in Oregon, once beat our some of the most famous pinot noir wines from the Burgundy region of France. The Drouhin family, was open-minded enough to realize that there may be a similar terroir in Oregon the Burgundy, and bought some land and began making this wonderful pinot noir there. Since then, this area of Oregon has become very famous for its wines.
We watched the news, a movie, and then went to bed. The wind blew hard all night long.
Posted under: Cabin News • by Rick on 01/03/2006 at 09:35 AM
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Christmas at the Cabin, Day 11, New Years Day
This was truly meant to be a holiday with little stress, good food and being lazy. Still, we started the day with a dog walk “around”. Since I’ve mentioned this walk several times, I thought I’d give you a more detailed description.
We leave the cabin and follow a worn trail to the north along a gentle ridgeline. Just north of the cabin we pass the “salt lick”—an area where we place salt licks and mineral blocks for wildlife. In the summer we often see moose at the lick. And, it is always fun to look for the tracks of moose, deer, elk and coyote. The snow makes it easy to spot tracks, but there weren’t any today. Further along the trail to the north we come to Serenity Point. This is where the ridgeline ends and I’ve put a bench there where you can sit with your hot coffee in the morning (in the summer) and look down over the valley.
From Serenity Point the trail cuts along the east-facing side of the valley, slowly decending through the aspens into the bottom. At the bottom is Dick the Tree, just a little off the main trail. Bart’s Creek runs through the bottom and we cross the creek to get to the east side of the valley. At the creek crossing is an area we call The Blowdown. When the wind is blowing, this area becomes very volatile with wind whipping in all directions and apparently accelerated by the terrain. There are a log of trees blown down in this area—it is a real tangle—and there are new fallen trees often. I have to cut through fallen trees to keep the trail open, often.
Here, you can find aspen trees so big and old that I cannot wrap my arms around them!
From The Blowdown, a short trip north takes us to the south end of the Beaver Pond. This is a pond that is about 1 acre in size. It used to host a healthy beaver population and still has a hut. And, even though there are always a few fresh aspen branches added to the hut every year, there is no full-time beaver population any more. The pond is slowly silting up and will become a nice meadow in 30 or 40 years. Meantime, there are a few fish in it that are challenging to catch (and I release them back). Today, the pond is mostly frozen over.
After a brief rest at the pond we turn south and begin to follow the valley along the west-facing slope. In the summer we must stay well up on the side of the slope because of the creek running in the bottom where it is wet an soggy. But, in the winter we can walk along the creek’s path in the bottom of the valley and that makes it much easier in the deep snow. After a while we come to Picnic Rock. This is a huge granite rock that has fallen from the rocky cliffs that now line the east side of the valley. It is very flat on top and is a great place for a summer picnic. We used to have our picnics on the rock when we would visit the land for a day before we built the cabin.
The east side of the valley is now lined with huge, beautiful granite cliffs—a great place for marmots, bobcats, and coyotes to den. The lichen on the rocks comes in every color. So, we follow the bottom until the cliffs give way to a steep slope which we must climb gently to get around a tangle of dense forest that we call “the deep dark woods”. It is simply impassible on foot because it is so tangled an dense (although the dogs seem to find a way through.)
Eventually we come out on a road. This is Hidden Meadows Lane which bisects our property. We follow it back across the bottom of the valley toward the west through some very pretty forest. This is a great place to find mushroooms, raspberries and wild strawberries. The road winds a bit to get back to the top of the valley. This area of the road is impassible throughout the winter. The valley wall forms a natural snow fence and snows accumulate on the road. We’ve seen the snows there as much as 25 feet deep. Once we trek up the road to the hilltop, we are at the entrance to our driveway, which we follow back to the cabin.
The distance is about 0.6 miles and makes a good walk for us and the dogs each day.
I am cutting other trails on our land, especially on the southern half of the property, but these are not ready yet.
Posted under: Cabin News • by Rick on 01/03/2006 at 09:14 AM
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