New Life in the Woods

Last Monday we had a cold snap and some hail fell for about 20 minutes. Then it got warmer again, culminating in a very warm day on Thursday when it got up to about 65 degrees. Now, a couple days later, were back to hail again! Where have I heard this before? “If you ever don’t like the weather around here, just wait a bit and it will change.”

That was especially true today. It got cold again last night. Then, after about an hour of hail at noon (shown above), the sun came out and things warmed up to about 45 degrees. Around 4 p.m. the clouds rolled in again and hail started falling once more (shown in this picture, falling pretty heavy — look for the white streaks), finally becoming rain after a while. Lastly, about an hour ago, it started snowing! Of course, it is still above freezing outside so none of it stuck and the snow has since stopped.

But it is supposed to “rain” for the next several days, possibly through Thursday, so I was out this morning cutting more wood, just in case. At the very least, it will probably stay cold for most of this week and might get down to freezing. Makes me glad I haven’t actually planted a garden yet, but I plan to risk it later this week when things warm up.

I continue to work on the cabin here and there and other projects. No word yet from that interview I had with the State. I am betting I will hear something one way or the other this week though and I continue to look for other positions that I can apply for. I hope to have some good news to share before long.

The weather has been getting nicer and nicer. Today I didn’t start a fire until about 6 p.m. and had the sliding glass door to the deck open (and the screen door closed) most of the day. So it’s been great weather to go hiking!

I’ve noticed is that I have a couple wild Turkeys that seem to be regulars around the cabin. This morning I think they were poking around the front door. I heard a noise and saw one trotting away when I ran over to investigate. There are also a couple deer (possibly a mother and a yearling offspring) that seem to like to forage on the hill between the cabin and the main house.

I also found a bat sleeping the day away between a couple sheets of plywood up at the main house but the pictures didn’t turn out great because it was so dark where he was hiding. I did finally get a couple pictures of the lizards living under the rotten log in front of the cabin. Turns out there is a whole family of them, but most of them young and all of them are very small and very wary, so they are hard to get decent pictures of too. But I did get a couple as well as a bunch of other pictures, including some views of the country from up above the property, standing on the dirt road that curves around it. You can see them all on my Flickr site here.

Spring is here evidently… although we had more hail or freezing rain this morning. Leaves are coming out, however, and the flowers are starting to bloom. I have also been seeing more and more wildlife around the cabin.

I spent last week cutting wood and getting ready for my interview on Friday with Senior and Disability Services here in Grants Pass. The interview seemed to go well, but I won’t find out more for a couple weeks.

I was almost out of wood after Susan’s visit last weekend, and the chainsaw was giving me fits. I was having a really tough time cutting through the very hard Madrone wood that I prefer to burn when I find it. And I had found a big dead Madrone tree up the hill across the ravine, which was a great find. I cut it up into 4-5 foot sections and rolled them down the hill to the bottom of the ravine and then carried them over and up to the driveway. Some of the sections were almost 2 feet thick (although somewhat hollow) and the chainsaw was taking forever to cut through them. I put off cutting them into firewood lengths for a day or so but then I got a metal file to sharpen the chainsaw blade and after that it was easy! Who’d have thought?!?

So, the firewood problem well in hand, I have had a bit more time to look around and I have found a lot more wildlife around the cabin. I had been hearing bees just outside the porch of the cabin whenever it was sunny. I thought it was the daffodils which had just started to bloom across the drive, but it turns out there is a hollow in the tree there right where the driveway curves around in front and there is a beehive inside it. I tried to get a close-up of the bees zooming in and out but they move so fast they were all a blur. Could be a honey beehive, but it is very high up so they are in no danger from me. There is also a lizard that lives under a rotten log at the base of this tree, but I haven’t managed to get a picture of him yet. He comes out when it is sunny but is well camouflaged and very skittish.

Then today, walking around the driveway and through the woods, I saw one of the wild turkeys foraging on the ground. I followed him around but he was pretty wary and never let me get too close or get a better picture. A few days ago I saw a tree frog on the ground in the same area. And a little earlier today I caught a glimpse of the bobcat again! That’s what sent me back to get my camera. Supposedly bobcats are nocturnal and rarely seen by humans, but I am guessing that my bobcat is a female and probably out hunting for her young. She watched me closely and ran away as soon as I moved, which was the only reason I saw her at all. I heard her move and froze at first. Then, when I moved a few paces further down the drive she took off fast and I saw her flitting in and out of the trees about 50 feet away.

And, as I mentioned at the start, the wildflowers are starting to bloom. I think this an herb named “Birthroot” (also named: coughroot, ground lily, Indian balm, Indian shamrock, lamb’s quarter, milk ipecac, nodding wakerobin, pariswort, rattlesnake root, snakebite, three leaved nightshade, trillium, and wakerobin). This is the largest of the wildflowers I have seen so far and, I think, the prettiest. It is all over the shadier areas of the ravine on the North and West-facing sides. Supposedly it is good as a salve for insect bites or stings, useful as an antiseptic, good for coughs or bronchial problems, and for “female problems”, whatever those are. It is the first wild plant I have (tentatively) identified so far, aside from trees. I hope to identify many more as they grow and flower throughout the Spring and Summer.

You can see more of the wildflowers and other pictures I took recently on my Flickr site here.

All the weather forecasts were warning about freezing temperatures and snow for this weekend. Friday morning started with some light, fat flakes of snow. Within twenty minutes it had turned to a mixture of snow and rain, and pretty soon all the snow on the ground had melted, but it continued to go back and forth all day and later that day some very small hail fell.

That evening a small disaster hit. Smoke started pouring out of the chimney at the top where it meets the pipe that goes through the roof. The wood stove had been letting out a lot of smoke whenever I opened the door for a day or so, but it does that sometimes when the wind blows a certain way, when it is very cold, or for reasons I haven’t fully grasped yet, so I hadn’t been too worried about it. Now, though, the house was filling up with smoke and my eyes were burning. I quickly piled the wood from the fire in my ash bucket, carried it outside, and tossed it on the gravel driveway. Then I went back inside and opened the windows upstairs and the doors downstairs. Pretty soon it was cleared out inside but cold. It was not a chimney fire, thankfully, because the smoke stopped when I removed the burning coals from the wood stove. But it was dark, so there was nothing I could do about it until Saturday.

I spent a cold night downstairs with my electric heater and wrapped in my sleeping bag and some blankets. I had a hard time sleeping, and when I did fall asleep I ended up sleeping late. When I woke up I checked my email and found one from Susan, the owner, saying that she was driving up that day for an overnight visit!

So, I spent a few chilly hours tidying up a bit here and there in and around the house and then got to work on the chimney problem.

The weather was mostly clear Saturday… cloudy but no rain. I took apart a bunch of the old scaffolding I had used to repair the plumbing and built two ladders out of it. One to reach the roof from the deck, and another to reach the chimney on the roof. The roof is too steep to walk on securely, so I needed something up there to keep me from sliding off.

Once I had those made I carried them through the house and out to the deck where I put them in place. Then I secured them to the deck and to each other as best I could. Light was starting to fail as I finished all this, so, grabbing a screwdriver, I climbed up to check out the vent at the top of the chimney and see what the problem was. I had thought I would need the screwdriver to take it apart, but the cause of the problem was obvious. The vents around the top of the chimney were encrusted with thick layers of soot and ash. It had built up to the point where the vents were almost completely closed off. I used the screwdriver to clear them out, and climbed back down. Feeling sure that this was the cause of the problem, I started a new fire and it worked just fine. Still, it was clear that we would need to “sweep” the chimney, or hire someone to do it.

Late Saturday Susan showed up at the main house and stayed up there overnight. Today I took her on a tour of the repairs to the cabin and she was enthusiastic and said I had done a great job putting things back together! She took me to lunch in town and then gave me $100 cash for hardware and told me she had sent me another check for $200 through the mail for other repair supplies. On the way back I stopped off at a home repair place and got a chimney brush and enough extenders to reach all the way down the stove pipe. So, now I’m a chimney sweep. Move over Dick Van Dyke! Actually, scratch that… I will not be doing any tap dancing on the roof.

And I have a fire going today (it has taken until today to completely warm the house back up to really livable temperatures), so I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to do the sweeping. It is supposed to be sunny on Monday… but who knows! We just had another brief hail storm about an hour ago. The weather is very unpredictable up here!

When I woke up this morning I came downstairs to use the bathroom and surprised what I believe was a cat on my front porch. The front door is a big glass pane in a metal frame and there’s no curtain there (yet) so whatever is outside can see inside easily. All I saw was the back as it ran away and up the hill across the driveway and for a moment I thought maybe it was a raccoon, but it was thinner than that and moved swiftly and gracefully, like a cat. I think what fooled me at first glance was the ringed tail, but it turns out that Bobcats have a similar fur pattern. They also have black stripes down their back. The one I saw was grey with black stripes on the back at least, and you can see that a bit in this picture, although the breast has some browns and tans.

I had seen paw prints in the snow sometime in December or January, some of them ran under the house and away, others I found later running up the driveway. I am not a great tracker though, and couldn’t tell for sure whether they were cat or canine tracks, although I thought they belonged to a medium sized cat or smallish canine (like a coyote). Now I believe my visitor has been hanging around for some time. It seems I am living in her territory. She owns the place and I am only a tenant! Maybe she was here to collect the rent?

If you want to know more about Bobcats, check out the National Geographic Bobcat page. I have set up these links so they will open in a separate page or “tab”, so look at the top of your browser to click back on this page for the other links. You might also be interested in listening to some Bobcat Sounds. Press the blue “forward” button with the “>>” symbol (third from the left) to display the full playlist and hear more tracks.

And, if you want to get the full flavor of what it sounds like up here at night, try listening to these sounds as well: Frog Sounds, Deer Sounds (try track 11), Turkey Sounds (track 5 sounds like my owls), Squirrel Sounds (try tracks 5 and 10), Raven Sounds (track 1 says it all), and Sasquatch Sounds (track 8 is spooky and not that far away! o.O).

In some ways I think life up here was better when I had no electricity. I’m talking about last October when I first came up to visit. It was darn cold and the old wood stove hardly warmed things at all, but it was dark and quiet. I spent a good part of my first night up here out on the deck listening to the wildlife. It was a little bit scary having no electricity and almost no heat, but it was exciting and the woods had a much more mysterious and enchanted feel.

Lately I seem to have fallen into habits similar to my old ones. I watch TV each evening, mostly looking for news about the Democratic presidential race. Then I cook something and play with my computer for a few hours. When it is dry outside, I go out looking for more wood to cut, but little of that is exploring.

To be fair, it has been cold and rainy (if not snowy) for the last few months. Not great hiking weather. A few days ago, however, it was dry and the woods started to wake up with the first hints of Spring. The first thing I noticed was a few squirrels chattering in the trees outside the back deck. I’m not sure what they were arguing over, but they made an amazing range of sounds. It sounded like a quite complex conversation.

That evening I heard an owl hooting and went out to investigate. I walked up the driveway to the West with a flashlight to see if I could find them, but without luck. At first it sounded like there were several owls and they were quite loud but my flashlight may have shut them up. On my way back to the house I heard something that could have been a coyote or a wolf but I’m not sure. Instead of the typical “oooooEEEEE” sound some canines make, this one was more like “OOOOOoooo”, with the louder part at the beginning. It was loud also and sounded quite close. It was probably just a deer or something, but I hurried back to the cabin. hehe

The next day I did go out to explore the woods some more. I followed the ravine up until it reached the road (Dutchy Way) where it curves around to the South. The ravine gets really steep at the top, almost too steep to climb, but I made it. I walked along the road for a ways and then followed an old logging road down into the woods again, finally looping back to approach the cabin from the South.

This picture shows the cabin from across the ravine in back. As usual, a bunch of my pictures didn’t turn out that great. I tried to get a decent picture of a woodpecker, but he flew away and hid. My pictures of the first wildflowers of Spring all came out too blurry, but I did get some semi-decent pictures of some other stuff.

This one shows the fallen Fir trees down in the ravine — the ones I had to toss the logs over to get them up the ravine. You can see how one of the trees is caught up in other trees pretty firmly. I still haven’t decided how to cut that one up. I may have to do the upper part manually with a bow saw, since it wouldn’t be very safe to use a chain saw up there.

At the bottom of that tree are what look like some fungi growing underneath. However, they are very hard and I concluded that it is tree sap that drained out of the dead tree and collected there where the tree probably cracked a bit when it fell.

This one is definitely a fungi. The picture isn’t that clear but I thought it was worth including to show some of the strange fungi that can be found out in the woods. Most of the more conventional mushrooms have disappeared over the Winter, but I am starting to find some here and there as it warms up.

And further down the ravine, almost where it meets the road I found another one of those strange nests of piled branches, twigs, and leaves. Just below it you can see a large beige mushroom, one of the most common shrooms that I see in the woods. I haven’t positively identified it yet, but I’ll let you all know when I do. Of course, the nest builders also remain a mystery. I think I need to bring a picnic lunch and some binoculars some day and just wait until I see who lives there.

Meanwhile I keep looking for work and there isn’t a lot of change from day to day, so not a lot to report. But I will keep posting whenever something newsworthy does crop up!

This was supposed to be posted yesterday but I lost internet in the middle of writing so I had to rewrite it today.

I’ve been keeping busy doing chores around the place. There’s always more stuff to reorganize or clean up. I haven’t tackled more repairs because I’ve been waiting for Susan to reimburse me for the last stuff I did. But fixing the rest of the electrical system may not end up being to expensive so I may just go ahead and do it next week. Mostly I’ve been job searching. Well, the searching part doesn’t take too long, but customizing my resume and cover letter for each job that apply for takes time.

Yesterday I noticed that I was getting distressingly low on wood. It has been getting warmer lately, with highs in the 50s and occasionally 60s, but it still gets down near freezing at night sometimes and whenever a storm comes through the temperature plummets.

All that Fir that I spent so much time tossing up the ravine and then carrying up to the house didn’t last nearly as long as I’d hoped. I’ve heard Fir described as a hard wood, and certainly it is a lot harder than Pine, for example, but it sure does burn a lot faster than the Madrone I burned for the first couple months. So, yesterday I went out and got a bunch more wood.

As my mother pointed out (after looking at my pictures on Flickr), this whole area seems to have been clear cut a long time ago. There are huge old stumps here and there in the woods. It is easy to imagine that those trees were thousands of years old, but the oldest trees out there now are maybe 100 to 150 years old. Most are a lot younger. The woods are pretty thick, but a lot of it is youngish trees under 10 inches in diameter, all growing very tall and close together, competing for the light. Inevitably, some of those trees lose out on the competition, so there are small dead trees everywhere. Some of them have fallen over but it takes a long time for a tree to rot, so many of those are still sound.
Yesterday I dragged or carried a bunch of them to the driveway. I didn’t go more than a couple hundred feet, but I ended up with a bunch of trees under 6 inches and maybe 30 feet long. One old Madrone stump was almost a foot thick and about 12 feet long. There are bigger Fir trees that have fallen over in the ravine below the house, including two right next to the one Mark cut up for me last year, but they are hung up in other trees and I am nervous about using the chainsaw on them until I get more experience with it.

I set to work cutting up all the trees I’d gathered for firewood and then carting it back to the cabin with my wheelbarrow. It was a lot of work. Using a chainsaw is tougher than it might look. You are mostly bent over while cutting and you should ideally hold the saw off to the side so that you are not in line with the blade in case it hits something and kicks up. So it is an awkward position to maintain and, although the saw is not terribly heavy, you have to grip it firmly and apply pressure while cutting, but not so much that you dig the blade into the ground (or rocks) when you cut through.

So after all that I am pretty sore today, but I have a fairly big woodpile again. That’s a relief because I still expect lots of cold weather ahead. Spring is on it’s way but not quite here yet. I have noticed some bulbs popping up here and there and lately I’ve been hearing frogs in the stream below the cabin. The wildlife thinks it is Spring already, but it still feels plenty cold in the mornings to me. Maybe I’ll go exploring a bit today and see what other signs of Spring are out there before the rains move in again tomorrow.

I finally got a semi-decent shot of my little visitor. One of the problems is that I have to take pictures of him from inside, through the glass windows, which face South and reflect a lot of light. So, if the picture looks a little weird, that’s because I did some post-processing on it to darken it, enhance the colors, and reduce the contrast a bit — because the original was pretty washed out.

He shows up as many as 5-10 times a day sometimes, when the weather is clear, and pigs out on peanut butter and bird seed. You can see that he is looking nicely plump after a couple months of this, but so far I don’t think any of his friends have followed him back to the feeder. Sometimes I think he may be part of a nested couple and they keep watch for one another, with only one at the feeder at any given time, but they are so small that it is hard to tell for sure whether the other one is in the trees nearby. I still haven’t found my bird book, so I’m not sure what species he is but maybe one of you out there can tell me?

I’ve been working on my job search as much as I can. Some applications take more effort than others. I applied for a government job the other day that required me to fill out a very detailed application that was about 12 pages long. That, along with rewriting my resume a bit to gear it towards that position, took me about 3 hours. This was mostly because I had to try to find details about some of my work history that I haven’t worried about for years. I hope to explore the town a bit more next week and keep an eye out for help wanted signs.

Meanwhile, I keep trying to get things done around the cabin, but my energy level has been lower than normal. I think I might have had a cold recently, but it was mostly pretty mild, aside from getting a bit achy and extremely sleepy at times. The other day I dragged about 5 smallish fallen trees across the ravine and up to the driveway. Yesterday I got out the chainsaw and cut it up for firewood, just before the rains started up again. I got it stacked on the porch just as it really started to come down hard.

Today I brought a few more things up to the main house and cleaned up some junk that was left scattered around it. I found that recent rains had started up the leak in the roof again and shifted some buckets to try to catch it all. I think that house could be a great place to live if some changes were made and things like the leaks were fixed. I’d be happy to help out if anybody is interested.

So, life goes on and everything starts to come together bit by bit. I hope to get my tax returns done this weekend and I got a Medford newspaper today so I can look a little further afield for job oppportunities. Wish me luck!

It’s been a mostly uneventful few days, although I have a few things to report. I was feeling depressed last week, probably a case of SAD, or it could just be my usual periodic mood swing. The days are even getting longer, with darkness coming just after 6 p.m. these days, and it has been mostly sunny and warm. But I can’t expect just being here in this beautiful spot will reverse all the causes of depression that I’ve lived with for so many years. Certainly being more active and being outdoors helps, but it is not a panacea.

I have also been trying to quit smoking, but with limited success. I can do fine for fairly long stretches of time (6 hours or so) but then I start to feel highly agitated. I probably need to get out and take more hikes, which helps, but only somewhat. There’s been no results from my job search so far, but folks seem to move a bit more slowly up here, so that may be part of it. I will just have to keep at it.

I did get out and do more exploring a couple times over the last few days. The other day I followed the ravine behind the cabin down to where it intersects with Dutchy Way. A little ways down I ran across what looks like a nest of some sort in the woods above the stream. It almost looks like a beaver dam, but it is about 30 feet above the water. Later I thought I saw a bird perched on top of it, but I am not sure. I know some birds do nest on the ground, so maybe that’s it.

Since it has been sunny for the last week or so, the stream below the cabin has pretty much dried up. The spring up the ravine from the cabin still runs, but the water sinks into the ground among tree roots at a spot just above the cabin in the ravine. As I followed the ravine down, I found that it re-emerged about 200 feet below the cabin at the spot shown in the picture.

I also tried panning for gold at a couple spots in the ravine (you never know!) but without any luck. I don’t have the right sort of pan, but this is definitely the right country for it. Gold has been found all over this area (although mostly to the South of here) and all the way down to Northern California. I look forward to trying it again at some later date when I have the right equipment and can look around more, maybe on BLM land. I did find a nice clay spot in the ravine just up from the house, with a sort of greyish-tan clay in the stream bed. So, if I can ever afford to buy some pottery equipment, I have a supply of clay right at hand.

A few hundred feet further down (from the spot where the second spring is) the ravine meets Dutchy Way and I walked down it to the mail boxes to check the mail. A little further on down Dutcher Creek Road, there is a small bridge over the creek (which my little stream and many others feed into). I walked down to look at it, since I always drive past but had never seen it. It was about 12 feet wide and flowing strong. Almost a small river. Very pretty too, but the land to either side of the road is privately owned and I didn’t want to trespass, so I headed back.

Today I brought a load of stuff up to the main house. Mark finally got back to me and told me where the keys were hidden, so I can keep the house properly locked. I plan to move up all the kitchen stuff that was left down here, one of the spare beds, bedding and some furniture, so that Susan will have it to use when she visits.

A few days ago I finally figured out where the recycling place is up here and brought over a full car load of cans, bottles, paper, and cardboard. I still need to arrange for trash pickup, but I don’t have a ton of trash since I am careful to sort out anything that can be recycled. Both of these things (moving stuff up the main house and clearing out the recycling) have helped clear out a bunch more space in the kitchen, which is encouraging.

I think I was able to keep the Winter blahs at bay somewhat when I had to work so hard to stay warm and fix the plumbing up here. It forced me to get moving to get stuff done when there was a break in the weather. It didn’t always work. There were days when I just collapsed and read a book or something. But it definitely motivated me. And time is speeding by. Soon it will be time to start a garden and work on many other projects around here. I expect I will snap out of it soon. I have no doubt that finding a job will improve my mood as well. I’ll try to keep the updates coming more frequently.

I wish I had more to report from the last few days but I haven’t gotten a lot done recently. Maybe it’s not so amazing how much work it takes to stay warm and eat when you don’t have central heating or a regular stove… but I never fully realized it until I got up here. And it wasn’t until I took a break and relaxed for a few days that I began to realize how much of my time and energy it was taking.

The last few days have been warm and clear, getting as high as 50 degrees during the day, but falling close to freezing again at night. I stopped wearing sweats or other warm clothes under my jeans and felt cold most of the day even with the warmer temperatures. It takes a long time for the wood stove to heat up the house from a cold start in the morning.

I’ve been dragging back small fallen trees from the woods whenever I go out for a walk and the other day I finally fired up the chain saw and cut these up into small pieces. I had also carried a bunch of wood up from under the house the day before and split it, so that gave me a couple days of not having to haul wood up the hill. Still it remains damp for a long time in this climate so I have to bring in a few loads every afternoon to dry out for the next day. It is really tough to start a fire with damp wood and, even when it works, it takes forever to really get going and warm things up. So now I have all these thin little logs arranged around the fire, some of them just sticks, but they burn great once they are dry.

So, that’s been a bit of a relief — both the warmer temperatures and not having to worry so much about snow and running low on wood. I have used some of the time to try to get some things done inside the house, but my progress is slow. Every time I think of doing one thing, I think of several other things that I should do first, so I tend to get side-tracked a lot. I spent about 2 hours the other day looking for the hardware to put my TV hutch back together, but I still haven’t found it. I am sure it is in a box or bag somewhere and I will eventually find it.

But now it is time to get busy looking for work and that will be my focus for the next couple weeks. There are always a ton of other things to do here, but I can’t put the job search off any longer. And I think it will be good to get out and get busy with work for a while, see the town more, and meet people. I may not have a lot to report for a while as I work on that and other little stuff around here, but you can expect semi-regular reports of what’s going on. Hope all of you are well!