Monthly Archives: October 2015

Better Living Through Chemistry

(This is basically a commercial, though I am not being paid for it.)

The natural life can be wonderful. But sometimes it can suck. The glass on our wood stove door gets seriously gunked up with creosote, and that stuff is a real pain in the elbow grease to get clean. About every two weeks I roll up my sleeves, clean the ashes out of the stove, then set to on the dense, incredibly tough brown-to-black stains on the glass left by burning wood. It can take half an hour or more to scrub that stuff off and have clean glass again. And if I let it go longer, it can take an hour.

If you’ve had trouble with creosote on your wood stove glass, this post is for you.
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The Many Values of Nothing

Ahhh, fall. The gradual change in the air, the turning of the leaves, and the haunting calls of Sandhill Cranes as they gather to migrate south again. And to once again stalk the wily moose. Fall seems so brief up here that when September arrives you’re just itching to get out and enjoy nature and see if you can bring a tasty friend home for dinner.

During last year’s caribou hunt, we’d talked about trying a float trip down the Wood River this year for moose. And so early one morning Kevin May, Ken Severin, and I met up at Wright Air Service with all of our gear to fly out and get dropped off on the Wood River as it flows north out of the Alaska Range. Kevin flew out on the first flight with a bunch of our gear, and Ken and I joined him about two hours later on an airstrip cut out of the forest and running uphill. There was a horse-based hunting guide’s camp there. He’d come in from the south.

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