Category Archives: Alaska

Alaska, Cold Weather Life, Off-grid living

Not a weather report.

It’s still cold. But Blue lives. My son got it warmed up enough to start and we have had it running since. I’ll turn it off when I can plug it in to reliable power or for brief times in the store. Of course it might work out better if the truck could build up some heat. I nearly freeze on the drive home from work. Putting cardboard over the radiator didn’t help one bit. I’ve been thinking the thermostat is not working right but now someone told me that Cummins engines have a thing where they don’t heat up in extreme cold. I’ll have to do some research and talk to the right people. I’m no mechanic, but I know things could be better.

The real star of the week has been the Scone. It’s really a Scion A-somethingorother that I bought for cheap off of marketplace. It has a manual transmission and it runs good. Best of all the heater works great! And it starts well even at -20. As much as I love Blue this one isn’t bad.

I knew that the DOT puts in a good effort to keep the roads clear and safely driveable for those of us with common sense. Sometimes it takes a few days to get to all of the roads and the snow gets hard packed into ice. The other morning Chris and I drove past a convoy of four graders that were stairstepped to scrape the ice from the truck lane at a RR crossing. The blades on each grader had teeth to bite into the ice and break it up. It looks pretty effective.

Snow clearing for DOT may have found a place on my list of possible future jobs. Nobody would expect me to drive fast and everyone smart would be appreciative. Plus I would get to work with heavy equipment. That’s been on my list for a while now.

One thing I say a dozen times a day is how much I love all the colors up here. Sunrise is ever closer to 10am and sunset is before 3:30pm now. At the solstice the sun will be up for just about 3 hours total, but that doesn’t mean we are without light. Two hours before sunrise it starts to get lighter and the skies are painted with pastels. Then two hours before sunset I start seeing those sunset colors showing up among the clouds. The light and color lingers even after the sun is down and the camera in my brain is filled with amazing views and compositions that I could never capture on my phone camera. I think the only way to really see it is to be here and to soak it in.

Yesterday we went to a tourist spot that is also a favorite of the locals. Chena Hot Springs has been a resort destination for over 100 years. I’ve been there twice now and can definitely say that the colder the weather the better it is in the pool. The hot springs themselves run at over 150° and are used to heat the buildings, greenhouses, generate power, and the pool. The outdoor pool has plenty of cold water mixed in, but it still runs hot and sulfurous. My friend’s stainless steel ring turned an odd bronze/black color after spending a couple of hours in the water.

After soaking in all that heat it was extra hard to get into Blue and drive nearly 80 miles home without heat. I’m going to have to get that fixed. I’ll also have to remember to bring blankets for the next time we go on an outing.

This whole adventure has a steep learning curve. I kinda jumped in the deep end by starting out off grid. But I’ve come to see the lack of cabin as a blessing in disguise. I’m able to be minutes from knowledgeable help if something goes wrong. By next winter we’ll know what we’re doing and it will be easier in a cabin. In the meantime there’s so much to enjoy along the way.

Alaska, Cold Weather Life, Off-grid living

Winterizing is not a scam

The glow of hope. Will Blue run today?

I was talking with one of my coworkers back when we hit -30. It’s her first winter too. She came up from Idaho to live with her sister. When I asked if she had gotten her vehicle winterized she said not yet and told me the most ridiculous thing. Her dad has a friend who runs a car dealership. They often went to him for a friends and family discount. She asked him about winterizing her car since her sister had told her how important it can be up here. He looked into it and came back to tell her he thought it was a complete scam and he recommended against it.

If winterization is a scam, the entire state has been bamboozled!

Almost every car you see will have a plug hanging out of the grill somewhere. Some people even keep their cold weather extension cord wound up on the front of the vehicle. Every workplace, school, apartment building, and hotel has plugins for each parking space. I have had guests wonder what the plug is all about, assuming that we have a lot of electric cars up here. We don’t. This just powers the heating pads that get installed on the batteries, engine block, oil pan, and transmission pan.

If the temperature gets colder than about -10° the oil thickens up. One ad on the radio compared it to sucking honey through a straw. It can’t flow enough to protect the engine so the engine can run to heat up. The batteries can freeze and lose power, sometimes permanently. If you can’t warm up the vehicle enough to start then you just have to wait for warmer temps, whenever those might come along.

Blue hasn’t started for two days. I have gotten Chris to drive me to work in the Scone, but he now wants me to drive myself. The ridiculous thing is that I bought the car with a manual transmission and let him learn to drive it in the snow but I’m afraid to do it myself. Yeah, my anxiety is showing there. I’m going to leave Blue plugged in until 8:30 and see what happens. If it’s a no-start I’ll have to suck it up and drive the car. Such is my life.

Blue and the Scone

Alaska, Cold Weather Life, Off-grid living

One of the worst sounds you can hear…

Living off grid means using a generator for power. We need electricity to power either the Toyo heater or the propane heater. Electricity powers the heat tape that prevents the propane from freezing in the line. Electricity powers the heat kit that will allow my truck to start after a night of -20°.

When so much basic comfort relies on a device you tend to pay attention to it. You start to know all it’s quirks. You get a sense of when something might be wrong. And when you rely on a generator the worst sound you can wake up to is silence.

Silence means the generator quit. Silence means no heat. Silence means you better get dressed and bring it inside to figure out what killed it.

Ice in the carburetor bowl is a bad thing.

If it didn’t run out of gas, the reason the generator quit is usually related to water. Water in the fuel turns into ice in the carburetor, fuel line, or filter. Or, like this morning, condensation can build up frost on the air intake and choke it off. You quickly learn exactly what tools to pull out of your kit to take it apart for diagnosis. Hopefully it’s something that can be fixed quickly.

Living away from city sounds is a beautiful thing. It’s nice to hear nature. But in the extreme conditions where you need to rely on power, silence is a terrible sound.

Alaska, Cold Weather Life, Food, Off-grid living, Stories

Cold weather, hot drinks

I just got a text from my son asking me to put some coffee on the stove. He had to go out for a while and wanted a hot beverage for when he came back. Back in Oregon coffee on the stove would mean Cuban coffee (super strong espresso) but here we have started doing it a bit different.

Coffee, hot chocolate, or tea?

We have a regular coffee machine. It makes just enough for a cup each and does a decent job. It’s easy to clean by dumping out the paper filter and also does double duty as a generator fill timer. If we want to know how long the generator has been running we just look at the clock. Often we will unplug it after filling to reset the timer. We get 8 hours per tank of gas, and then we need to refill.

My friend works as a move out house cleaner. Sometimes people leave interesting things behind. One person left three of these stovetop percolators. She gave us two. They have proved useful for simply heating water for dishwashing and don’t put a strain on the generator like the electric one does. As long as we have propane flowing we can have hot water or coffee.

Just yesterday my son told me that he really prefers the coffee from the percolator to the electric one. If you get the grounds right and let it boil the right amount of time it can make some really nice coffee. It can be as strong as espresso but not so bitter. Add in sugar and cream or some condensed milk and you have a wonderful drink to warm up with.

Alaska, Cold Weather Life, Stories

I don’t usually do memes…

…but this one has been floating around the book of faces for a couple of weeks and it makes me want to tell stories.

So far I have refrained from hijacking people’s posts with my reactions to this one, but there are so many things I want to reply! Fortunately I have an outlet that can’t be called hijacking. I just stole the meme to start with.

These are the roads I have been driving for the last month. They’re going to be like this to some degree until March or April. This being my first winter in Alaska, I have had to do some adapting. My knowledge of snow driving only came from the crap we got in Portland, Oregon. Most of the time snow there came at 30-34° and we never knew what portion of it would be snow vs freezing rain or what order it would come in. The city, county, and state barely knew how to clear it if they even had the equipment. Last time we got a big snowstorm in Portland we discovered that the city had sold off most of its snow removal equipment to avoid the storage and maintenance expense. Seattle had to send down plows to help, but by the time they arrived it had all frozen into rutted ice on the roads that made driving an absolute misery.

Here in Alaska it’s a different story. Downtown still gets some rutted ice, but the DOT doesn’t mess around on the highways. Even the smaller rural roads (like the one in my picture) get plowed. Some of them are plowed by the people who live there and use the road. It makes a huge difference when there is a significant snowfall like last Friday. I had to pull my friend’s Prius out of their own driveway because it got high centered on the unplowed snow. They ended up parking near their road where I was able to pack down the snow with my truck. There was talk about asking the neighbor with a plow to make a pass through for them.

Temperature makes a big difference in traction and snow behavior. When giving me driving advice everyone told me that if it’s warmer than 15-20° the roads are going to be more slick. Colder than 15° and they aren’t so much to worry about. The friend who drives the haul road (ice road that doesn’t go across frozen lakes) explained that the colder it gets the better your traction can be. At -20° the weight of his truck will melt a bit of the ice on the road, which then immediately refreezes, causing the tires to stick to the road. Kind of like if you were to try licking a frozen metal fence post. (Don’t try that.) The traction comes from constantly freezing and unsticking as the tires roll down the road. Even with my considerably lighter weight van I can feel the difference in traction at those colder temps.

This doesn’t mean that everyone has great traction. Good tires help. Good driving habits help more. Last week when we got a foot of snow we counted at least 9 cars in the ditch on the way into town. I tend to drive the speed that the road and my vehicle tell me is safe. If I feel a bit of sliding wobble I let off the accelerator until I’m stable. I feel zero need to go the speed limit on the sign. But I get people flying past me all the time. I haven’t yet seen any of them lose it but I’ve had other people tell me about watching someone hit the ditch in a cloud of snow after passing recklessly.

Now for the towing story. It isn’t entirely snow related, but I found it interesting. I got to spend time with some co-workers after work. One of them brought her husband who has lots of stories and loves to tell them. He was describing how he wants to get a property farther out from town and set up a mechanic shop with maybe a couple of tow trucks. An encounter with a disabled vehicle during hunting season made him think it might be a useful venture.

He was way north of Fairbanks, maybe a hundred miles or so. There’s a whole lot of nothing up there in a way you can’t imagine until you see it. He saw a guy stopped alongside the road in a pickup with a trailer. He had two moose carcasses in the back of the truck and more on the trailer. It turns out the guy was bringing back the results of the hunting party but the alternator went out on the truck. He offered to help get the truck running enough to limp back to town, but the guy declined. He was waiting for a tow truck. He had been waiting for 11 hours and the bears were starting to circle, attracted by the moose meat, but he had been required to prepay $1000 just to get the truck sent out and by golly he was going to get his money’s worth.

After making sure he couldn’t do anything to help the mechanic continued down the highway. After a while he came across a tow truck that had a different pickup loaded up on the back. He flagged him down and asked if he was looking for a disabled truck of a certain description. The tow driver said yeah, but he couldn’t find it. But there was this truck left on the side of the road so he wasn’t going back empty handed. At this point the mechanic was like WTF! The truck he had loaded up probably belonged to a hunter who was going to come back to no vehicle while the guy who already paid for the help was literally going to be abandoned to the bears. The tow driver had not even considered that the vehicle he grabbed might not be abandoned. He was persuaded to put it back and was given directions to find the right vehicle. The mechanic took this incident as proof that there is a need out there.

See? Too much to hijack someone’s post. But it makes a good post of my own.

Alaska, Off-grid living

Reliable heat is almost here.

It’s too dark to get a good picture but I have a heater sitting just inside the door of the RV. There was just enough room to put the exhaust/air intake through the wall under the window. This small Toyo started out in the small cabin that Nena’s aunt built. When she left the cabin was sold but the Toyo stayed. Chris and Nena collected the necessary fittings to be able to hook it up.

I would like to say Chris hooked it up. Nena would like to say Chris hooked it up. In reality he was a good assistant and learned a lot. Actually, he had an easier time using the flaring tool on the copper fuel tubing than Nena did so he was necessary to the operation.

Today they need to make a stand to hold up the tank we will be using for fuel oil. The light was long gone by the time they started thinking about it. Fortunately for them the temperatures are in our favor. Yesterday got up to 38°, which is insane considering last week’s temps. We know they’ll be going down again soon so this needs to be done. This is the best time to get it running.

I’m so excited to have the prospect of reliable heat! I’ll get some pictures to share later on.

Alaska, Off-grid living, Stories

It’s 50 degrees warmer than last Tuesday!

4 Comments

It’s still 23° though. We got more than a foot of snow and the temps are up in the slip-and-slide range. When it comes to driving colder is better. I’m new up here and I already understand. Once there is snow on the ground the driving conditions only get better as the temperature goes down. -20° lets your tires grip in ways that +20° can’t.

I posted about my ride along to Prudhoe Bay back in June. Part of the experience was the stories told by my trucker friend about what the drive is like in winter. He tells me that traction in the cold actually comes from your tires constantly freezing to the pavement, then breaking loose again as the tire rolls forward. The weight of the truck causes moisture on the road to briefly melt then freeze again. That odd fact combined with experience with the road and great confidence allows the big trucks to go cruising at summer speeds.

We still haven’t gotten a roof over the pit. There is a good path worn into the snow to point the way. My friend Missi and family is waiting for a proper roof and seat to be built over their new pit. Some time soon the ladies will give up waiting and make it happen. The guys just aren’t as invested in a proper outhouse experience.

There is something to be said for roughing it. Or, as I once heard it phrased, voluntary hardship. It isn’t comfortable while you are in the middle of the rough parts, but you will always come out the other side stronger. Whether you want to improve your physical strength or your emotional strength, it is worthwhile to choose the more difficult path.

So here I am, dealing with temperature extremes, ice, and uncomfortable outhouse experiences. I keep repeating what an adventure it is. I’m enjoying myself. I hope you are enjoying the stories I tell along the way.

Alaska, Off-grid living, Stories

Moose lights = Work lights

The RV is back up to 55° again, all thanks to my dear son and my friend’s slave-driver of a daughter. Our outdoor temps have warmed up to -7° and it’s snowing. The forecast calls for it to come up as high as 30°. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 60° swing in just a couple of days. Crazy! But it’s all cold.

Cold nicely summarizes the last few days. And let me be clear, it isn’t just people who don’t like cold. Generators don’t like cold. Propane doesn’t flow in extreme cold. Vehicles don’t like cold. But everything hinges on the generator. I can plug in the block heater on the truck if the generator is running. We can wrap the propane tubing and valves in heat tape to keep it working if the generator is running. We plan to install a small Toyo heater in the trailer, but again it needs the generator for power. The generator needs a box to keep warm. It’s been on the list for weeks now, but Chris doesn’t have enough experience to wrap his head around making one. That’s where Nena comes in.

I’m happy to brag on Nena any time. She’s 17 going on 37 and takes no nonsense from anyone. She has plenty of experience keeping her family warm when things break down at -40° and knows what needs to be done. So when she tells me “here’s what you need to do” I’m going to listen. Luckily Chris is also willing to listen and learn.

So far we have had a couple of generator parties where Nena walked us through the process of troubleshooting. She has taken apart and put back together more generators than I have seen in my life since they have been living this lifestyle for almost 6 years now. I figure she has a clue.

So anyway… back to the first picture. It’s a bit messy but I feel like it sums up everything. It got dark by 5pm but things still need doing. They needed more light than headlamps can provide. So Chris used the moose light mounted on the Scone. Yeah, that’s our storage area under the front of the trailer. We have bins that came up from Oregon, spare propane tanks, generator gas, diesel for the truck, and other stuff. It’s not pretty but it does what we need for now.

I guess the generator hut is done enough. We shall see how well it works. We are a few more parts away from being able to install the Toyo heater. That will happen this weekend. I might even get the porch and steps I want so I don’t break something by slipping on the RV folding stairs.

My generator is running again. My truck is running again. My heat is working again. It might still be cold but life isn’t bad and I always live in hope of better things.

Alaska, Stories

It a little bit cold outside.

We are getting a good sample of Alaska cold this week. Last night was -31°F and the night before was -23°. Our heat is not working. I keep reminding myself that I signed up for adventure and that’s what I’m getting.

Since the sawmill kept breaking we were unable to get lumber cut and cabin built before the snow. So we are going to spend the winter in the RV across the creek on my friends property. RVs are not set up for temperatures like this. The propane tanks are located in a cubby on the outside, which allows the hoses to freeze up. So we got enough gas flow to run the pilot light on the stove, but not the burner for the heater. Then the generator went on strike because it was cold.

Last night Chris and I slept with no heat except for shared body heat under the blankets. The dog tucked himself in at our feet. The top blanket had a layer of frost on it by morning. It worked, but it was really hard to get out of bed.

I’m giving Chris the assignment of finding a way to get things thawed out by this evening. We’ll see how it goes.