By Joe Crain
November is a big transition month for us few who remain at camp year round. The month often starts with fair fall-like temperatures that are in the mid-40s for highs and mid-30s for lows. By the end of the month however, winter is more the mood as the temps struggle to stay above freezing and the lows often flirt with the low teens. As we enter November, the lake is still ice-free and the delight of wave watching is still a favorite pastime. But as the month ends we begin to see a permanent calm come to patches of water as ice begins to form out in the main body of the lake, as well as along stretches of shore. Often, the smaller bays are frozen over by month’s end. If the conditions are just right, on a wind-free night with a clear sky when the temperature falls into the low teens, we may wake to a perfectly motion-free lake that has transformed into a giant sheet of glass-smooth ice. It is really something to see a nearly unblemished sheet of ice stretching from the shore of camp’s waterfront all the way out to the mini light house on the point of land about a mile out. We woke to such conditions on the morning of November 29th, and for a short period of time the whole lake was frozen over with perfect, glass-smooth ice! It was short lived though as a bit of a breeze came out of the south and a persistent bright sunshine opened a few cracks. By lunch time the glassy surface yielded and was replaced by the usual chop of open water that eroded the ice down to covering maybe half of the lake. With the forecast calling for temps in the mid 30’s for the next few days it looks like a complete and persistent freeze over won’t happen until December this year.
One of the biggest transitions ushered in with November affects us caretakers directly. Our already small crew of three becomes only two at the middle of the month when our seasonal caretaker finishes work for the season. In an average year, the first two weeks of November find us winding down our outdoor work with a bit of wood splitting and stacking. This year, nature threw a spanner in the works when a four-inch snow dump occurred at the beginning of the last week of October, when we would normally start the fall leaf blowing. Caretaker/Cook Cody Keys and I had to switch things up this year and put off leaf blowing in hopes that warm temps would return and melt the snow off of the fallen leaves. We reversed our normal schedule and went after the wood piling up at C.N.O.C. first. The cold temps persisted and our late October snow stuck around for more than a week. But with Cody’s time with us growing short we were forced to start leaf blowing in poor conditions and had to move about camp’s grounds to blow leaves in any open ground we could find. The conditions forced us to be nimble; we were able to do the front yards of the waterfront houses but not the back shady areas. The Lumberjack Village gets good southern exposure to the sun so we were able to blow leaves throughout, while there was still two inches of snow covering the grounds of the more tree-shaded Axman Village. Thankfully, things continued to melt and allowed us to make steady progress as we hopped about camp in an odd pattern, blowing leaves wherever the melted snow allowed. One last big warm up occurred the weekend before Cody’s final couple of days and we were able to get all of the grounds’ leaf blowing completed on his final day with us. We were so excited to be that close to finishing at the start of his last day that we made a pact that we would go home at whatever time we finished. All day we worked hard and pushed ourselves forward, at last we did it and had blown the final leaf. I checked my watch, and what would our bonus time be? We were able to treat ourselves with a whole extra hour off!!
Looking forward to good smooth ice and lots of lake skiing this winter, it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp.
It was a big job that Caretaker/Cook Cody Keys got started by pulling off all of the old bench top planks as Caretaker Andy and I wrapped up the jobs we were working on. Some came off with ease and others Cody reported were quite the chore being held in place by 4 inch spikes driven into still solid rail road tie posts. But when we all came together for the post pulling phase, Cody had all of the seats off and sorted into the keep-for-reuse and too-rotted-to-keep piles. Next we used an set of old logger’s tongs fixed to the tractor bucket with heavy logging chain and pulled each of the old posts out of the ground. Some were only 20 inches in the ground and popped out more easily, but most where well anchored in place at about 30 inches in the ground. Once all of the old posts were out of the way we graded the site with the tractor bucket to even and refine the slope as well as filling all the old post holes. Now we were faced with the daunting task of digging about 130 new post holes, setting all of those posts both plumb and level to each other in the current row, as well as giving each row its proper bend to give the needed view of the fire ring for all of those seated. Well, after a lot of hard physical work, a bit of debate, some trial and error, the rental of 2 different types of post hole drilling machines and about 3 ½ weeks on a soggy sandy work site, a much improved Council Fire Ring has been completed, ready to comfortably wrap up each week of the camp’s seasons for decades to come. We’re really happy with the results: wider seats, uniform 16 inch seat heights on every row, and all post anchored at consistent depths.
I’m not sure how many of you who were at camp this past season were aware that we spent most of the season in a severe drought. After all, to most of you hot sunny days are what summer camp is all about! Rainy days are an unwelcome interruption to the daily routine and program offerings. Now I’m sure there were a few of you who noticed the lake level gradually decreasing as the season progressed. Some of you may even have noticed the soccer pitch was fading a bit under foot as you ran after that impossible to get pass on what was supposed to be a masterful execution of a set play your team had planned. But for the most part I’ll bet most of you were so wrapped up in the summer fun that you were unaware of the remarkably few rainy days; by the end of August our area was more than 5 inches below average for rainfall. As a caretaker I became acutely aware that the grounds were under great stress as the months progressed. Riding on the mower one of the few times I needed to mow the grass, I was engulfed in a cloud of dust. And the grass was only healthy looking in shaded areas, and was dwindling to seed spikes in the areas of full exposure. The trees were also showing signs of drought stress as they were dropping more leaves than was usual for a normal summer. I was getting a bit concerned when by mid-July we had little more than a few spotty showers since the last of the snow melted in April. Well, I’m happy to report that once September began, the drought abated and things have turned almost 
Well, the grass has recovered quite a bit from the drought and I’ve needed to mow a couple times already this month. Elsewhere around camp the post season work jobs have started. Caretaker Andy has removed the water from all of the pipes in camp, and has added the antifreeze to all of the drains and toilets for the soon to come frosts and winter freeze up. Cody Keys has again joined us for the fall as our “seasonal” caretaker and assisted Andy with taking out the water, and has been scraping the Big House porch floor and preparing it for a much needed fresh coat of paint. After returning from my annual September vacation I have kept busy tearing out rotted wood on Logger 5’s entry threshold and some rotted siding on the back of Swamper 1. The list of jobs needing attention never seems to get any smaller as one job is wrapped up and two more are noticed and take their place.
As predicted at the end of last month’s article, March has been more winter than spring. On the “meteorological” first day of spring, or as the non-weather nerds amongst us refer to it, March 1st, winter was still firmly in control with the high temperatures still hanging well below the freezing point and snow dominating our forecasts. But in the second week of the month, the weather started to turn a bit. We got some hope of an actual start to spring-like conditions with temps reaching above the freezing point and even nearing the 40-degree mark for a couple of days. Our ridiculously tall snow banks had started to recede to just absurdly tall dimensions as things started to melt a bit. In my yard I like to use the three-foot-tall bird bath we have out back as a sort of snow depth gauge. The bit of melting that came in the second week of the month hadn’t reduced the depth to a point where the top of the feeder was visible. Still, I was excited that the two-foot-tall pile on top of the birdbath was significantly reduced! But then in a cruel twist of meteorological fate, the weekend that brought us an extra hour of afternoon day light, the start of Daylight-Saving Time, we had a wind driven snow storm that dumped an additional seven inches on top of my non-scientific snow depth gauge. And just as we were about to celebrate the “astronomical” first day of spring, or the “Real First Day of Spring” as us traditionalists like to refer to it, we woke to another deposit of 14 inches of snow. So now we were faced with more snow on the ground than we had at the start of March, the month with two days that claim to be the first day of Spring! In the span of three weeks, we saw more than 20 inches of fresh snow on top of the three-plus feet we still had on the ground. Every time I went out to shovel the latest storm away, I came back into the house with sore shoulders, not because the snow to be tossed was heavy but because I had to throw each shovelful above my head to get it up and out of my trenched walkways! The sides of the roads had banks plowed over my head, and while I’m not Charlie Barrows tall, at 5’8” that’s a tall snow bank.
Thankfully on the last weekend of March things started to turn warmer again and we had several days in the low 40s. I was very excited when I returned from a trip out of town for the weekend to find the top two inches of my birdbath visible above the snow cover! The “spring” sun is much higher now at its zenith, giving the sun’s rays much less atmosphere to pass through so that even on days that weren’t feeling so warm, the roof edges were dripping with snowmelt. You can really start to see the effect of this reduced solar zenith angle on the south-facing snow banks which are becoming pitted and shrunken at a rate much faster than the north-facing banks. A phenomenon that gets me excited every year at this time, because no matter the current temperature or snow depth, the astrological reality is that spring will come!
Is it just me or does anybody else get the impression that February, the shortest month of the year, often seems to pass the slowest? Is it just its location on the calendar as the third month of hard winter that make it seem like its mere 28 days last forever? Could it be that, after making it through the harsh transitional weather of December and the brutal cold and blizzards that always seem to come with January, we are at the end of our metaphorical rope when it comes to dealing with all of winter’s challenges?
That’s how it was for me with snow this year up here at camp. I’m a big snow and winter person as those of you who have been reading my Arrowhead articles through the years know. I was all ready for a great season on the camp trails. I got the Miracle On Snow out, my 1975 Artic Cat Pantera, after the first few small snows came and had the old beast up and running for its 48th year of operation. (All of those years were not with me, for what it’s worth.) The amazing piece of machinery started again with no issues and I had run it around the camp trails once to establish a good base. I was anticipating an awesome season on the cross country skies shushing about on camps trails. Then, boom, to much of a good thing: 16-20 inches of the densest, wettest snow we have seen in years, and rarely so early in the season. The snow was so dense it looked blue rather than white! So much snow, all in one shot, and this wasn’t that nice “tasty” fluffy stuff either. According to the local weather reporter it had a density of five to one, which they explained meant that for every one inch of water only five inches of snow was formed. A nice fluffy snow will be at a density of 18-1, or 18 inches of snow for every one inch of water, which is most common for us here this far north. Heavy density snows usually only happen here in the spring when the temperatures are quite a bit warmer. Well, with Mother Nature dishing up the treat, you don’t really get to decide to overdo it accidentally or otherwise, you just have to cope and survive it. And the snow has just kept coming all season. We’ve had several eight-inch snow falls and a number of six-inch storms, and… burp…burr…shovel, shovel, shovel……where are we going to put it all…and…it’s…only… the end…of…January……
And as I’m sure those of you how have been at camp know, there are an enormous number of cabins and screens at camp! I started this replacement project several years ago in the Axemen Village, and that year I was able to get two and a half of the seven cabins completed; The Annex, Axmen 2 and half of Axmen 4. In 2020, with more time for less urgent projects, I was able to complete the replacement of all of the screens in the Lumberjack Village. So, with not much snow on the ground at the end of November I decided it would be a good time to get back to this ongoing project. I knew that it was only a matter of weeks before the snow would accumulate to the point that I would no longer be able to drive into forcing me to spend all of my time inside the shop. So, I figured I’d work on replacing the screens in the Axmen village until the snow depth forced me in for the rest of the winter. I’m happy to report I was able to complete the rest of Axmen 4 as well as Axmen 2 and 3 before the big two-day storm that struck us on December 14th and 15th. That monster storm left camp buried in 16 inches of super wet snow and shut down driving into the Axmen Village for the rest of the winter.
It looked simple enough on the jobs list: “Repair hole in siding near back steps of the Little House”. I smiled to myself when I read that. 28 years of experience, at a place that had been around since 1929, had taught me that a hole in a building’s siding in a place that has very low traffic and virtually no rough and tumble camper traffic usually means a seemingly simple thing that is anything but simple! When I walked down to have a look, I found that a large section of siding on the Little House had been replaced sometime in the past with a large patch that stretched the full width the back door, just below it. I wondered to myself “what is that hiding?” Sure enough, just to the left of the patch was an innocent looking hole, about one-and-a-half inches long and maybe three-quarters-of-an-inch wide. Nothing on the outside of the building suggested the cause of the hole. It looked to be forming from the inside to the out, and with the big patch right next to it, I thought to myself, “Rot!” So, I pulled off the chunk of siding that contained the hole, and discovered an even bigger hole behind it in the sill plate and joist that ran about six inches to the left of where the surface hole was, leading directly to the big patch under the door. I of course now knew what that patch was hiding! I pulled the big, newer patch of siding off the building and sure enough that innocent looking hole on the outside was just a symptom of a much larger problem that had been covered over. I pulled off a lot more siding to reveal the full extent of the rot: a six-foot gap where rot and critter chewing had completely eaten away the sill plate and exterior wall joist!
It didn’t take long to see why the previous repair had ended in a patch-job; the only way to replace the rotted section was to remove the brick and concrete stairs leading to the door. Unfortunately, when the stairs were attached to the building, they went up past the brick foundation and pressed right up against the raw joist and sill plate. And wouldn’t you know, shortly after I got everything exposed, a chipmunk popped up from inside the hole and chittered at me. I grabbed my phone to get a picture of the little bugger but he ducked back in before I could get to the camera app. Well, after a bit of head scratching and thinking it over, I came to the only solution. It could not be not a new patch. The brick and concrete stairs had to be demolished so I could make a proper repair. I recruited Caretaker Cody to help, and with a couple of sledge hammers we made quick work of getting the stairs out of the way and dumped in the rubble pile where they could cause no more problems. With the stairs removed we were able to remove the rotted section and insert new material, and wrapped the whole works up with new siding and two coats of paint. While Cody and I moved on to leaf blowing Caretaker Andy took over the job of building a new wooden deck and set of stairs. I repaired the hole in the siding near the back steps alright… and I just like I suspected; it was a seemingly simple job that was anything but simple!
