The Spring of 2014 was a hectic time as we were trying to get moved from the house in Maryland in order to take up full time residence in the holler by the barn. We found ourselves taking frequent overnight and even out-and-back trips with the truck loaded with possessions to relocate. The pace of these trips meant that at times we would swoop in, unload, and leave. Well, in this one particular day we were just walking around for a minute before jumping back in the truck and heading to Mordor on the Potomac.
As I rounded the root cellar/garden shed I was struck by something in the corner of my eye that didn’t look quite right. On closer examination my heart sank, as the catastrophic damage to the building was readily apparent. A look underneath from inside the root cellar confirmed that decades of frost heave and the spring snow melt caused one wall of the root cellar to collapse with a couple of tons of debris scattered about inside.
With zero time available I departed for home and called my pal Tony to ask him to take a peek at the problem and offer some counsel. Tony is a local contractor and amazingly inventive guy.
He reported back a couple days later that he had shored up the building with some of the timbers in my lumber storage and hydraulic jacks from the barn. That would hold stasis until we decided what to do next, which I will recount in the next blog post.
As they say about many things in life, timing is everything.
With winter setting in here in the Allegheny Highlands, I’ve been trying to time the winter shutdown of the hydroelectric system in order to avoid the carnage of last winter, as lengthy sections of the pipeline to the turbine froze and shattered. I planned for the shutdown to occur at dusk today. The system has been performing brilliantly, even with several consecutive nights with lows about 10F.
Today we took a trip across the mountains to get some lumber and groceries, returning just before dusk so that I could walk the line and shut the system down. The day was cold but sunny, between 15 and 20F as we headed out, and the turbine could be heard doing its little turbine work. As we pulled up on our return five hours later, parked, and got out, a sickening silence cut through the air. The gentle whine of the turbine was missing.
After quickly unloading the groceries (the lumber can stay in the back of the truck) I headed up the hill to see what the situation was. The situation? I waited one day too long. The water in the pipeline has frozen in place, and all I can do now is wait for the pipeline to thaw to determine the level of damage and make the repairs. Surely some will have to be replaced, but that might have to wait until spring. Had I closed the system down yesterday, I could have resumed it on the warmer days here. Now? Probably not until late March at the earliest. Good thing we added the extra solar panels last September. In the morning I will brush off the snow and get back to work on the various projects around here.
I also need to re-examine every part of the pipeline system, to get it perfect. Clearly, it is not so now.
It is now just past dusk here, and even though they are predicting a low of 2F tonight, it was already 1F a half hour ago. I suspect the air temperature will get to minus-5F or maybe even minus-8, and with winds gusting to almost forty miles an hour, that will yield a wind chill of around -40F.
If you come across any anthropogenic global warming crackpots (but I am being redundant) whack them with a snow shovel.
One of the front-burner activities over the past couple of months was getting ready for our first full winter in the Allegheny Highlands, where winters are essentially identical to those of upstate New York or central Michigan. Having spent my formative years in Minnesota, admittedly in southern Minnesota, the more tropical part, the upcoming winter in the mountains is something about which I am fairly sanguine despite three decades in the Mid-Atlantic. However, since my bride of 34 years is from Southern California the angst is running high; my task of keeping the cabin warm and toasty is priority #1.
The assembly of gigantic firewood piles has continued apace. Virtually all of the available spaces around the cabin are filled to the brim with cut, split, and mostly well-seasoned wood (I especially have sought out dead trees on the hoof). This picture is of the cabin front as of last weekend.
We’ve even loaded up the side deck with firewood.
On top of this stash, my pal Mike told me he had a bunch of dead and risky trees he wanted removed from his farm, so for the past several days I’ve been working with him to accomplish that. The result for me has been five heaping trucks-full of mostly already-seasoned firewood, now awaiting splitting and stacking into giant piles out the the lower barn. The local tradition is to always have two full years of firewood on hand. We literally see firewood piles the size of garages here.
Add that to Mrs. Donsbarn’s efforts to get the gardens prepared for spring, including the nurturing of greens in the front raised bed with a plastic hoop house (her goal is to have fresh greens for Thanksgiving) and things are shaping up here at the homestead.
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