Nurtured by Love

Category: Rural life

  • Trail-building

    Trail-building

    Armed with three hand-tools — a mattock, a rake and a saw — I have been gradually building a trail from our yard to the Galena Trail. For years I’ve been frustrated by the can’t-get-there-from-here dilemma that separates me from my favourite running trail. We planted a geocache down on the trail more than ten years ago, and the GPS co-ordinates proved what maps had led us to suspect: while it took 25 to 40 minutes to get to that point on the trail, it was only about 175 metres away as the crow flies.

    The problem with getting to the trail more directly was two-fold: the grade, and the vegetation. The direct point-to-point grade was about 47%, which puts you somewhere in the realm of a black diamond or double-black-diamond ski run: definitely not the right way to build a trail. And of course trees, bushes and undergrowth had to be circumvented or moved. I ended up with a trail of about half a kilometre long with an average grade of more like 15%. Definitely hike-able both down and up.

    It was a curiously addictive process. I would go out planning to spend 45 minutes touching something up and return to the house three hours later. There’s something about actually changing the landscape, of creating something useful out of nothing — well, not out of nothing, but out of nothing that looks like a road or a trail, nothing useful from a human locomotion standpoint. It was like having a superpower: I bisect the wilderness with roads, using my own two hands!

    Next year I’ll get to work extending the switchbacks to allow it to be closer to bike-able. If it was manageable on a mountain bike, one could get to town quickly without needing to hit the highway at all.

    I’m sure there will be places where the soil will settle and the edges of my trail will need shoring up. I’d love it wider in some places, even for hiking, and there will be oregon grape and wild rose and bedstraw and devil’s club to be tamed continually. But the route is laid out and for now it’s useable on foot. Meaning my favourite running trail is just four minutes away (eight huffing-and-puffing minutes on the way back).

  • Garage: before

    Garage: before

    We’re building a garage. Well… no, more to the point: we’re having a garage built. An important procedural distinction, one which will likely ensure the timely and effective completion of the project.

    The aging carport will come down. A year ago, expecting it to collapse under the weight of a fairly ordinary snow load, I enthusiastically parked the old minivan under it whenever I could, hoping for a catastrophic collapse that would crush the van. Alas, when spring rolled around, the carport was still standing, and the minivan still belonged to us.

    Now we have a minivan I treasure. I have no desire to crush it. I do, however, have a desire to park close to the house, avoid hours of windshield-scraping, and have a place to store bicycles and skis and camping equipment. You’d think with all the sheds and shops we’d have ample storage space, but somehow that isn’t the case. Almost all that space is filled with Chuck’s tools and machines and workspace and materials and might-come-in-useful-someday stuff. So yeah, I’m actually looking forward to having a garage.

    After we built the addition to our house back in 1997, the one that took us from four rooms to a dozen and gave us actual bedrooms for ourselves and our children, we realized we had almost no photos to remind us of what the house looked like before we so drastically altered it. We took pictures of the building process, but not of the “before.”

    Will I miss the way the reverse grade inside the carport allows for the formation of unexpected downhill sheets of ice? The kind that encourages vehicles to continue to exercise the Newton’s First Law of Motion as one attempts to gently apply the brakes in order to cease movement before striking the end wall? Will I miss the impossibility of reversing up a sheet of said ice? Or the door-obstructing upright posts? The leaky roof that supposedly performs the duty of keeping our firewood seasoned and ready to burn? The endearing 2-foot cedar tree trunk that is integrated into the whole contraption in some sort of organic and semi-structural way? Will I miss the overstatement of the term “carport,” when it is in fact merely a “front-end port,” meaning that rear windshields still need to be shovelled off and scraped free of snow and ice? Probably not. But just in case, here are two photos.

  • Sufferfest Weekend

    It’s Kootenay Sufferfest weekend. Chuck is away but the girls and I got involved in volunteering the first day. Fiona and Sophie volunteered as marshalling assistants. Fiona was marshalling up-mountain at the halfway First Aid and Marshalling station. She and I sat right at the snow line with slush falling for 7 hours. Plus it took us almost an hour each way to drive the logging roads to get there. So a very long day. But she was awesome: she saved the day a couple of times when the adults had got too distracted by communications issues to note a bib number on a racer.

    The experience played right into her wilderness skills homeschooling project what with the various pre-race first aid and marshalling planning meetings, the communications relaying (we’re way out of cellphone range, and sat-phones were unreliable in places because of terrain) and keeping an eye on runners and riders for signs of hypothermia, and watching and helping them avoid succumbing to the elements. We had a market tent, which helped keep us from getting soaked the skin, and also took our Biolite stove and made hot chocolate for runners and volunteers alike. I was working first-aid, and thankfully there was nothing more than minor stuff; a few of the bikers who looked in danger of getting hypothermic during the first loop judiciously dropped out of the race before attempting the second pass, and none of the die-hards got into difficulty. Not that there weren’t some serious worries by the organizers. It was so cold, and there was a lot of snow up high. The Idaho Peak Run came off just fine: 14 runners finished. But the early snow made for a lot more challenge and hazard than had been expected. I’m glad this hadn’t turned out to be the year for me to attempt that run.

    Sophie helped marshal the first and last runner aid stations. She and her marshalling buddy were on foot, carrying water and food since there was no road access. The race director and I had used backpacks and bike trailers to haul in some of the gear the day before, but they still had to carry some. They also had almost no radio or satellite phone contact, so were very isolated. They had a really long day. Sophie had left home by 7 am, and hadn’t surfaced again by 4 pm. I made a thermos of hot mochas, and took to the trail to run out and meet them. I met them at the halfway point of their hike out. I was very glad to see them still upright and coherent!

    Me (#493) and some of my running buddies, keeping warm in the rain and mud pre-race.

    Today I went over to Kaslo and ran the 10k Sufferfest trail race. I did surprisingly well: I got 1st place in my age-group (40th place overall). It wasn’t a big race — under 200 participants — but I was really pleased by how strong I felt. I haven’t run much the past few months, but I have done a bit of strength training, which is new for me.

    I haven’t run a race shorter than a half-marathon in more than 3 years and I really enjoyed the shorter distance. It was rainy, mucky and slippery, with lots of little steep hills, so the times weren’t that fast, but I got in in under an hour. The push up the hill for the finish left me feeling spent, but within ten minutes felt pretty much fully recovered and felt like I could have run a lot farther. Maybe next year I’ll go back to running the 25k. Or maybe not. At this point I find that a 10k doesn’t really require any training more than my haphazard recreational running, and that’s nice.

  • Thermos hack: yogurt-maker

    I have a large plastic thermos, and inexpensive item that is world-weary and not particularly water-tight. It has a capacity of about 3 Litres, and is perfect for making a large batch of yogurt for our family. Since we’ve been freezing the local summer fruit bounty, the kids are making a lot of smoothies and subsequently we go through a lot of yogurt. This is so cheap and easy.

    A Thicker Yogurt

    4 cups boiled water
    4 cups tap water
    4 2/3 cups instant skim milk powder
    1/2 cup fresh yogourt with active bacterial culture, or two packets of yogourt starter

    Combine boiled and tap water in a large thermos. In my house the resulting temperature is about 115ºF, which is ideal for starting a yogourt fermentation. I can trust this temperature, but if you’re trying this for the first time, definitely check the temperature of the mixture and adjust as necessary. Whisk in skim milk powder, then whisk in the fresh yogurt. Using skim milk powder allows you to get a thicker yogurt by getting more milk solids in less liquid volume, and it means you don’t have to go the fussy process of heating the milk to kill any lingering thermophils.

    Place lid on thermos. Place in unheated oven with the light turned on to provide a bit of warmth. Leave undisturbed for 8 hours. (Put a sticky-note on the oven to remind yourself and others not to turn it on! Ask me why my thermos is world-weary with bubbly plastic on the bottom…) With luck you should have a nice thick yogurt. It will firm up a bit more in the fridge.

    Yield: 8.5 cups of yogurt

  • Dandelion syrup

    About 6-8 cups of dandelion flowers yielded about 1 cup of packed yellow petals. We mixed this with 2 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water, brought to a simmer and allowed to cook for an hour or so, gradually reducing in volume to a syrupy consistency. Then we added the juice of one small lemon, strained out the petals, and cooled.

    It tastes wonderful! Like spring sunshine mixed with honey and lemon. Delicious on ice cream.

  • Hello, trees

    Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth.

    Yesterday we checked out the red cedar bark, which we will use for basket weaving. Years ago the kids did a workshop with this lovely local lady, and while they’re a lot of work, the tiny baskets we have since made have been very striking and rewarding. It’s still too early in the season for it to come away easily in long strips, but we’re looking forward to harvesting some in May. We then dug up some red cedar roots, to decide how useful they’d be for embellishing our baskets. I had read that they make great sewing material, but had never taken the suggestion seriously. They really are amazing. The slenderest ones are strong, pliable and lovely to look at, and they dry and increase in strength very quickly once harvested.

    We collected armloads of white pine cones to use a fire-starter next winter.

    And then we made our acquaintance again with the birch trees. We tapped a couple of birch trees years ago, but our sap collection set-up wasn’t ideal and we didn’t get enough sap to make a proper syrup. Because birch sap is about five times less sugary than maple sap, you need a heck of a lot of it!

    Sometime in the intervening years I managed to purchase four spiles and today we picked up some clear 1/2″ tubing at the local hardware store. All it took was a quick bit of work with the portable drill and a couple of taps with the mallet the trees began spilling their sap out for us with eagerness. We plugged a couple of tubes into each of two glass carboys and within an hour or two had a couple of gallons of sap.

    I imagine it will be incredibly time- and energy-consuming to boil the stuff down, but I’m happy to do it just once, to experience the process and the taste of the syrup.

    Birch sap is sterile and contains trace amounts of minerals, xylitol and various other good things. It’s actually a great source of safe drinking water. Not that we don’t already have safe drinking water, but hey, when civilization crumbles, this might be a useful piece of knowledge.

  • Ice

    The lake at the summit north of us has frozen clear, without snow. It’s not quite glassy, but quite skate-able. We’ve opted not to flood our backyard rink this year, so there’s even more reason for the trip to the lake to be worth doing.

    Fiona and I skated all the way across, and all the way back, and then spent some time “doing doodly-do’s” around the near shore. She found her skating legs quickly and despite the wind we both managed to generate enough body heat to stay toasty warm for an hour.

    While we were holed up in a “cave” beneath a rock, out of the wind on the far side of the lake, a coyote trotted directly in front of us, oblivious to our presence.