Last winter was long and hard. As a consequence, we burned about five cords of wood rather than our usual three-plus. I wrote last spring about some of the fun snow sport antics  that required. I usually have two winter’s worth of wood on hand so everything gets about two summers’ worth of drying. With short summers, this ensures dry wood to burn (I usually work with 16-inch pieces and split it as we use it.)

Snaffling that extra couple of cords out of the coming winter’s wood made for an unusually long firewood season this year. We came out of last winter with about two cords on hand. We now have twelve. I bought four of those, meaning that I brought in six over the summer, about twice the usual level. Quite a bit of this came from generous neighbors who were happy to have recently felled trees taken away. But a bunch more came from the Boombah Haulage Company —wood hauled out of the nearby woods on my back.

Piling firewood by the shed.

Fresh wood is very heavy, generally over a ton per cord. Birch is a ton and a half. Usually, after I dice up a dead or recently fallen tree in the Boombah, I let it dry for a month or so on the ground before stacking it to dry further, then I haul it out one human-tolerable load at a time the following summer.

When we left off with the really distant piles that I got tired of sledding out last spring, I was sure it would be easier to haul them out by hand instead. I was wrong. It looks like I’ll finish that experiment this winter with the sled again. Note to self: Don’t cut wood that far away again.

Loading the woodshed to the rafters.

In addition to providing cost savings, all of this is a massive carbon-footprint-lowering exercise. When we use firewood instead of fuel oil, we’re simply speeding up the release of carbon of dead wood instead of burning fossil fuels and releasing long-term trapped carbon into the atmosphere. A cord of dry firewood produces as much heat as over 100 gallons of fuel oil. This varies by the type of wood, but the three we burn are spruce (equivalent to ~130 gallons), aspen (~120 gallons), and birch (~190 gallons). By this measure, we saved well over 600 gallons of fuel oil last year. That’s thousands of dollars and a lot less carbon than not burning wood would release. How much carbon? 6.7 tons of CO2. So we can heat and feel good about it in three ways: the heat itself, the cost savings, and the lowered carbon footprint. That’s a lot of winning. This doesn’t even count the exercise that it takes to cut and move thousands of pounds of wood each year. I usually move every piece three times or more. This last summer by my estimation I moved a total of about 30,000 lbs. of wood to the area by the wood shed. It kept me off the streets.

Loaded for winter.

So, is it all a big win? It comes close to being so. But we have an emissions problem in the Fairbanks North Star Borough: poor air quality often develops during cold spells. When it’s calm and cold (think -20s and -30s), we get temperature inversions that trap all our exhaust near ground level. It’s colloquially called ice fog, but it’s exhaust and small particulate matter than is unhealthy. We can also get this sort of unhealthy air in summer due to forest and tundra fires, but those are deemed natural and we can’t effectively control our behavior in the short term to mitigate it. Our wood stove upgrade several years ago was part of the borough’s burning management plan.

Next summer’s hauling awaits.

We’re in the winning phase of the year right now, with a hot fire in the stove on a gorgeous winter’s day and with plenty of wood on hand. As I walk through the woods and see next summer’s hard haulage work stacked here and there like squirrel stashes—some seemingly rather far from their destination—I know it’s not all cheery blazes and cozy warmth. But that task has its own season and brings its own satisfaction. In the meantime, let’s toss another log on the fire.

We had some wonderful fall colors this year.

Some fallen aspen leaves I picked up while hauling firewood out of the woods.