The beautiful cold

People sometimes ask how we can live in the dark and the cold. Because of moments like this.

Journey by moonlight

And this.

We have been sunk in a beautiful, magical, deep, deep cold for the past few weeks. We got as low as -42C here on our property and even colder in the valleys.

By the light of a full moon

It seeps into the house through the nails on the door and hangs round us like stage smoke when we walk outside. Our water buckets begin to freeze overnight, our wash bowl is solid ice by morning. It bucks and pops when we put it on the woodstove to thaw.

Less fun. Busting out the water hole with an iron bar

We haven’t got down to -46C yet. I know when we have as the dry ice curls into the house when you open the door and billows across the floor in silent, slow-moving waves. But we don’t seem to see those temps in this spot, or not anymore, and perhaps I’m the only one disappointed by it.

There’s not a lot we can do when the thermometer falls this low. We try not to run our snowmachines for fear of breaking them. We would use Homer to haul our chainsaw in the dogsled and go to cut wood, but our trusty husky has developed a limp and is off cold-weather work duty for now.

The icicle tree

So we go snowshoeing and skiing and spot dead trees to cut down later. Homer is not fazed by the weather and bounds around us, delirious with the excitement of it all.

He got so giddy he threw himself over a 30’ cliff. Fortunately we have a lot of snow this year and he landed, not on a rock or chunk of ice, but in the pillowy mounds of drift below the bank. I watched him from the top, leaping in circles, eager for us to join him on the river. It is no surprise the moronic creature has injured his leg somehow.

His only concession to the cold is he will come inside and sleep on his blanket on the floor for an hour or so. Usually he doesn’t like to. Maybe he gets too hot, or maybe he gets bored of our incessant chatter, but for the moment, we have an occasional house dog.

Warming up by the barrel stove

If you’ve been hanging below -40C, -36C feels quite toasty so when it warmed a little a few days ago, we decided to visit some pals downriver. We miss seeing friends.

A pre-Christmas trip to The Post Office

We miss going out for a drink with mates like we used to in London but I’ve had to concede, you can’t live in the midst of one of the world’s last great wildernesses and keep up a varied and busy social life. I’m not one for compromise, but I’ve had to accept this.

Butchering a moose quarter. We make our own fun

But with weather warming a bit, we felt it was time to see some other humans. We also wanted the sheer, crackling joy and adventure of being out in the cold.

 Jupiter, shining like a guiding star in the sky

I wrote in my last blog about our amazing ability to forget important advice and break things. So, what could possible go wrong 50 miles from home, out on the river alone in the deep cold?

When it is very cold, we use our little generator, a Honda EU1000, to power an engine block heater to warm up our new Skidoo snow machine. The bastard EU1000 hates us and only works when it feels like it despite, or perhaps because of, our frequent tinkering with and petting it.

Big hole in the trail

It gave up completely the day before we planned to leave. Luckily we have a back-up, a larger EU2000 so I lugged that heavy beast out to warm the Skidoo so we could start the engine.

The plug for our block heater had worked its way against the muffler of the Skidoo and, as we have been driving round and the muffler got hot, it was melted onto the side. You don’t try to fiddle with stuff at 36 below, you just say, “Oh for fuck’s sake!” very loudly with big globs of ice sticking your eyelashes together, pant for breath in the frigid air and try to think of another way.

Our marvellous old two stroke machines

So we decided to set off on our two 20-year old Polaris 2-stroke snowmachines, celebrating the fact that good old-fashioned engineering still works in the damn cold.

And it was damned cold. With a horrible ground blizzard raging at this spot

The modern, fuel efficient 4-stroke snowmachines, like our Skidoo, are wonderful except for their total reliance on technology. At cold temps you have to plug them in to warm them. The old 2-strokes burn a heart-rending amount of gas, but they will start at -50. A bit of yanking on the pull cord, some swearing, a wish and a prayer and you’re off!

Neil ahead, vapour rising from an open lead in the distance

We sang the praises of our rattley old 2-stroke machines and felt so lucky to have them right up to the point one of them broke down.

Broken down and abandoned

Quarter of a mile after leaving our pal’s house, a coupler wore out and our Polaris Widetrak ground to a screaming, whirring halt.

It is very much our own fault. Two years ago that machine ended up stuck on the river for months when the jack shaft coupler wore out. It isn’t a hard thing to fix but getting the part out to the bush proved a trial. We got it eventually and our friends advised us to change the drive shaft coupler too as it would probably wear out around the same time.

Those deep cold, rose-pink skies

Wisely, we decided to wait until it did and resolved never to take the machine too far from home. The good news is it took a full 2 years for that coupler to wear out. The bad news is, by then we’d forgotten our resolution to keep it close to home and were 50 miles away on the open bloody river, where it still rests as I type.

Poor Piccolo, as we call our little red Polaris 340. We’d smashed up one of his ski skins on the way down but he still took us and our sled all the way home, ski skin hanging off as it was too frozen for us to remove. Ski skins are shoes that go over the skis to allow extra glide on deep snow.

So it’s like breaking the heel off your stiletto and having to carry on walking for 50 miles, but that little machine is unstoppable and we got home faster than we came out, less than 3 hours.

And it was all worthwhile for time spent with friends and for time on the river when it is at its most wild and beautiful.

Chatting with our pal over coffee, and before our breakdown even, he said, (to paraphrase)- “You know, people often ask what I do with my time in the bush and why I don’t try this or that for a hobby. They don’t understand, if I’m not getting wood or water I’m fixing things. Maintenance and repairs, that’s 90% of my time.”

Getting wood. Lots of time spent doing this

Yes, I said. I know. Us too. Fixing things. And breaking them. That’s all we do. We don’t have to time to learn calculus, raise chickens, weave sweaters out of dog hair or any of the other things well-meaning folk suggest we try. But, to quote another pal here, “if you didn’t get stuck or break nothing, you didn’t go nowhere.”

Journey up a local river yesterday. Got the Skidoo started. Something fixed.

Our kind friend has offered to tow the machine up to his yard where it will be safe and where we can work on it in his shop. Another has offered to tow it back home with his powerful 900cc snowmachine.

I also broke the maul axe. Fixed it with fibreglass. Horrid stuff. Like trying to work a ball of hair covered in superglue. It's holding up for now.

So we might not get many nights out in the pub but we do have friends, as well as a dog who deigns to sit with us occasionally in the evening, and that, like the cold, is a beautiful thing.

The business strategist, hard at work

In my next blog, we take our two remaining snow machines to town for one of the world’s most bizarre commutes as Neil has a day’s work running a strategy workshop for a local company.