Here’s another short blog about some of our activities out in Chicken to give people an idea of what the heck it is we do out there when we’re “off the grid.” This blog was from our second winter trip in April of 2018, when we still had 2-3 feet of snow. Don’t worry DK, by the time your character gets there in June, the temperatures will be hitting 80-90, and the sun will be barely going down at night.
We made it back from another trip to the cabin in Chicken, Alaska. Not as cold as our last trip, getting down around zero at night, but sometimes hitting 35 or 40 degrees during the day. Still quite a bit of snow, though it has melted down and is pretty compact now. We were able to snow shoe in much easier this time, not sinking up to our hips in soft snow in 0-degree weather. Unplugging once more, and spending my days reading and writing felt really good.
But it is not all fun and leisure, we do have chores when we are out on the land. Our biggest is stock piling/melting water. Not only to drink, but to store for later in the summer for our plants. Ray cuts up wood, so we can keep the fire going in our wood stove. I spent lots of time, knee deep in ice and snow with a pick axe and shovel, loading corn snow into barrels for later in the spring when we won’t see a drop of rain in the arid region, with the exception of the occasional afternoon thunderstorm. If we have to, we can get water from the RV Park in the “Town of Chicken,” but it is best to stock pile as much as we can from the snow melt in large 55-gallon barrels.
What are we watering? Every year we bring hundreds of small ground cover plants and trees to resupply the barren landscape. In 2004, 6.2 million acres of Alaska burned, the size of Vermont. The largest of the fires was the Taylor Complex fire near our land. That fire alone was 1.3 million acres. The department of forestry had no choice but to drop flame retardant chemical on the few historical buildings and communities in the very remote region, then let the rest of the Yukon and Forty-mile area go up in flames. What was left in the end was a standing dead forest that you can see in the background of my pictures. It was even worse when I first came out to Chicken with my then boyfriend (now husband) ten years ago. You didn’t dare wear white socks or light-colored pants. You would be throwing them away later from the charcoal stains.
Now that we are ten years in and have a cabin built, we have been slowly coaxing the boreal forest back to life, planting native trees and encouraging ground cover to come back. But we always try to get out to the cabin as early as we can in the season to stock pile water.
I will be re-posting my blog about the colorful characters in Chicken, featuring the famous Toad next.