Ice

That’s it. We’re out. Out of the water, out of time and, aside from the internet, out of contact with other humans.

We’re cut off until the river is frozen and we can snowmachine to town. Last year we didn’t have trail in until the end of January. Why the hell didn’t we buy more booze?

Ice on the hull

Two days after I wrote the last blog, a crust of ice formed at the shoreline and crept along the edge of our boat. We pulled the boat out straight away. By the following day, the river was filled with chunks of spinning ice and the eddy where it was moored had become a skating rink. We would have had to chop the hull out with an axe if we’d left it.

Neil moving the boat with the rope puller attached to a willow

It took two days to get the bloody thing across the beach, up the bank, turned 180 degrees and pulled into its winter resting place with a handheld rope-puller, chain hoist, rollers and skids.

Stuck in a hole

There are fiddly jobs to do like flushing the engine to remove silt- insert a hosepipe into the outboard, the manual says. Great, if you have a hosepipe, taps and running water. We had to plunge the lower unit into a plastic tote and fill it with buckets of creek water, and quickly before they froze over.

Me with rope puller and chain hoist at steepest part of the bank. Neil leaves the toughest bit for me.

The plug and battery cables were frozen into a massive ice cube in the stern so we spent hours delicately chipping and pouring hot water to free them. 

Always something in the bloody way

The motor is now greased, fogged and stabilised. The boat is up on logs and the river choked with pans of ice.

Our world has shrunk.

Ice shelf in the eddy

The wilderness feels small at this time of the year. We can walk for a mile on the shore downriver before it becomes a cliff, and only a few hundred yards upriver.

Shallow water in the creek

We can’t walk up the creek, into the narrow valley that rises to the mountain behind us until, and unless, it freezes. Side-hilling for miles along the slippery walls of a gorge, clinging to spruce trees, just isn’t fun.

Ice bridge collapses as Neil tries to cross

We can scramble through the woods up the steep hill to the side of our property and onto a narrow ridge that extends upriver. There are beautiful views but it’s not exactly a pleasant stroll.

We’ve stopped taking the rifle out and all but given up moose hunting. It’s unlikely we’d see one now. And I think we’re desperate enough to wrestle a bull to the ground with our bare hands and club it with a hiking boot, should we run into one.

With nowhere to go and hunting over, we decided to cut the old cabin in half with a chainsaw.

Destruction is so much more fun than construction

The old cabin was built in the 80s. It’s a small, moss-chinked trapper’s cabin with no foundations, and an extra room tacked onto the back. We removed the mud roof last year and made it watertight with spruce pole rafters and some old tin.

Sliding a knife between the logs to check for nails before sawing. We've removed the window

Sawing down from the old window frame with a board nailed in place as a guide

Our eventual plan is to build a log workshop/ snowmachine store from scratch. Building with logs is a slow process, especially when your logs are still standing, undiscovered, in the woods somewhere. And especially when you are as slow as us at building anything at all. We realised there was a danger the project might outlive us.

Removing wall logs

We’ve decided to cut a great, gaping hole in the side of the old cabin so we can drive the machine in and will replace the wall with a wide door.

The only obstacle was not having enough lumber, nails or door hinges. But what the hell, we’ve got a chainsaw, an angle grinder and nothing else to do, so we went at it, trimmed the tin roof and cut into the side wall.

Homer guarding his kibble which is stored inside

We rescued enough old planks and nails from around the property to make a door that we can baton in place with poles.

The back room of the cabin had sunk so it is at a 30 degree angle to the main building and also twisted. The main building has sunk and twisted the same amount but in different directions. We had to create a doorframe in a space where no two lines were parallel and no two bits of lumber straight to each other. It was like building in Wonderland where nothing was the same size or as it seemed.

In the end, we plumped for keeping the door straight by the spirit level and to hell with the rest. It looks very odd and I’ve a horrible feeling that the door may be the only thing left standing when the back room of the cabin falls away into the raspberry patch.

From the inside

This morning winter was in reverse and we went up to +1c. The snow is retreating and the ice soft as sorbet. The river seems in no rush to stop.

We keep a close eye on it. It rises, it falls, it swirls with ice, cracks, slushes, floods and will, all of a sudden, stop deathly still for months on end. At this time of the year, we become obsessed with it.

Large glacier forming at the mouth of the creek. This could wreak travel havoc later in the year

You can watch our 45 second epic of ice in the river here-

We’ve just started using the GoPro and aren’t finding it very easy. Your hands get cold, it always sounds windy and, unless we can grab the dog, there is a constant tink-tink of his collar in the background.

We tried to film from the ridge yesterday with me "presenting". The results will not be going on our YouTube channel.

Neil didn’t notice the grass waving in front of the lens, you can’t hear me because I didn’t speak loud enough and then the bloody dog wandered into shot. It’s like Acorn Antics in the Wilderness.

Ice pans from the ridge yesterday

We will persevere but we’ll have to diversify if we want to get hits.

Porn is where the money’s at and I think “Bush Porn” has a ring to it. There’s a market for everything nowadays, even Neil in his Marks and Spencer’s pyjamas.

It is still dark outside as I type, a warm wind is melting the snow off the roof and it has just started to rain. I can hear a military tattoo of drips around the cabin.

As soon as it is light we will dash to the bank to see the effect on the river. Will there be more or less ice? Larger pans or tiny platelets again? Will the ice shelf be flooded?

At this rate, we may be pulling the boat back in for a quick booze run.