Rick and Jen's Blog: Rick and Jen November Update

If you get our email updates, you have already seen most of these photos. The upload changed the order, and I don't know if I'm going to take the time to reorganize them, so there might be some jumping around from subject to subject.

Jen and I are caretaking the Baranof Wilderness Lodge in Warm Springs Bay. The bay is on the opposite side of Baranof Island from Sitka. It's about 20 miles across the island--we came by boat, which is a 90 nautical mile trip. Our caretaking duties run from early October until around May 1.

Baranof is a small community of cabins located near a fantastic waterfall and incredible natural hotsprings. There is a nice boardwalk, public bath house, and trails to both Baranof and Sadie Lakes.

This is the lodge on one of our beautiful October days. We had an unusually dry October and took advantage of it to prepare the lodge for winter and lay in a good supply of firewood.

Towing logs back to the lodge from one of the small bays out on Chatham Strait. Towing logs is a lot like herding cats....there's no way to tell which way they're going to go.

Once the logs are back to the lodge, Jen single-handedly pulls them up the beach. We try to arrive at high tide so we can float them up as high as possible. This keeps them as dry as possible and minimizes the distance we have to carry the rounds to the woodshed.

As the tide goes out, I can use the chainsaw to cut the logs to size. Sometimes I'm cutting and carrying the rounds up the beach just ahead of the incoming tide--it can really move!

It was such an unusual treat to be able to cut and split wood in sunshine!

Only with proper supervision of course......

Jen occasionally steals my old coveralls and shows me how to do it. She'll take an hour to split a round and then go back to editing her photos inside. She's an excellent stacker, however, and loves to carry firewood! She really loves the wood chips that come inside with a load of firewood too!

Jen had to finish up some flying and training in early October. Feral and I rode over to the bay with Blain and Monique on Sailboat Bob (along with all our "stuff"). When Jen flew in a few weeks later, she brought our absentee ballots. John waited patiently while we voted so he could take the ballots back to Sitka with him.

We had short bouts of normal October weather. There was one long weekend when we had almost 11 inches of rain in 4 days. Sadie Creek provides our drinking water and power for our hydro-electric plant, and it was really running after all that rain.

We've had a couple pretty good snowfalls already. Baranof is known as a "snow hole" with a micro climate that gets much more snow than many other places in the area. This morning (November 19) it's still snowing and has been for about 36 hours with snow in the forecast for the next week.