The true-to-title version: I found a fire-scarred birch on the hill above our house and cored it to see how long it’s been since the last forest fire here. It was surprisingly long ago.
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Category Archives: Alaska
Lots
Heavy forest fires in Interior Alaska some years back burned down a lot of trees. But these fires also changed human behavior, and not necessarily for the better. Who would want a home in the woods if your house might burn down? The woods still saw new homes going up, but in many cases trees were being removed with excessive exuberance. Instead of the standard 30-foot clearing around a home to serve as a fire buffer, 60-foot buffers were often created, or whole lots were being cleared. Forest one day, stumps the next. It was ugly.
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Fairy Wonderpants
We’ve had some good snow lately, and it’s welcome. As it gets colder and darker, a good blanket of snow lightens things up considerably. But over the past couple of days we’ve had that magical combination of light snow and no air movement that causes snow to pile up on everything and look fantastic.
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Late-season Silvers
I’d heard about some superb late-season salmon fishing on the Delta Clearwater River years ago, and finally the time came to try it out.
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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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