Signs of others...maybe trappers, prospectors, peoples of the First Nations

We are now finding old Axe marks....so old the bark has grown around the old blazes..... Moose and bears are still keeping this old trail alive.. they look like cow paths. The Taku River Tlingits told us of a trail from The Telegragh Trail....maybe this is it

Beautiful Snow .... and Weasel trapping

We trap Weasel for our friend Yaandeckin Yeil Wayne Carlick a Taku River Tlingit world famous carver and dancer

"The Second Drop" and a Wolverine

Trail is to be made just to the right of tallest big spruce in centre of pic.
First Vikki goes ahead with a spade and shakes all the snow off and exposes the slide alders. Then Bryan comes with his chainsaw and cuts a path 20 wide and throws the branches off. This area of slide alders is about 300 feet across and you drop 40 feet in elevation.

After 3 days of real hard work...cutting and throwing off fallen dead logs, removing stumps, leveling the side hill....this is called The Second Drop...Bryan is 150 feet away and 70 feet higher than me. He is half way up the Second Drop, the rest heads up steeper to the right to the top of the hill. For the first 3 trips down and back up this Drop Bryan had to move both the skidoos. Yesterday Vikki finally had the guts to climb up the Drop on her skidoo. But going down is another thing. By the time you are at the bottom you are flying....you can't apply the brakes or your skidoo will go sideways and start to roll.
after slide alders have been exposed...still need to be cut and throw

Wolverine

Black Bear Tree

This is marked with Black bear claws... we saw it today while making trail down towards the Inklin... this is the 7th straight day ....day break til dark. And Brian from Scotland....we will do a post on the Beaver Bush Plane. We call Chris our pilot ....like one calls their doctor their doctor. We pay him each time he brings us in or out.

4 Cats , a Dog and 7 Chickens

K-2, Big White, Emmie and Fuji on the stairs. And our dog Hannah...reminding us that she didn't get dessert and the jar of butter tarts is right here....in front of her.

We really are remote here

It's an hour flight by Beaver Bush plane to land on our remote lake. That is after travelling 200 km from Whitehorse ( the last 100 km on a dirt road to Atlin, BC...a town of 350 people). There are no roads or residents within 85 km. We have enough grub and supplies to last til next June and probably even longer. Over the winter , the owners of the big lodge 1 km east of us.....(they were there for 9 days in o9 and also 9 days in 08. ) have to send in a crew to shovel off the big roof or it will colapse.....Bryan helps....usually takes 5 good men.... 2 1/2 hours to do it..... and they bring us fresh vegetables.... We might see them 3 times over the winter (we email them if the snow load is 4 feet. And in March our friend henri might fly in for a week. We also hope to see the trapper who flies into his trapline 25 km south of us. Last year he visited 3 times. Otherwise it is just the two of us....our dog Hannah and 4 cats and 7 chickens.... In 07 Michael who was at the lodge started our Blogg....he said people will be interested in how you live out here..... and so it was started.... We get email from our family.... and friends.... and we have this blogg....we are so happy to share our everyday events... and really appreciate knowing that someone is out there.

Lake Frozen.....Whale noises...now booming

4 days ago the lake was open water. Now it is 6" thick and making loud noises like a whale as it expands. the temperatures have only been -12 C for the last 3 days. Ice is clear and black.

LYNX....Vole hunting

Vole hunting....lynx jumps from it's spot on the skidoo trail 4 feet... to try to catch a vole under the snow.

Breaking Trail...after the snow dump

Pics are a series of up the hill and backing down to try again.. we both finally made it up.... Bryan had not trouble after the trail was broke with his Tundra 550 long track skidoo but I only made it to 7 feet from the top before my little Tundra 300 Skidoo flipped over on me....burying me in the snow with the skidoo on top of me. I yelled for Bryan and he was soon there to pull that skidoo off. This hill is extremely side hill on the left and is 130 feet long, most of it 30 % incline the top 20 feet is 45 % incline. When it is fresh deep snow here, there is no body to the snow.... your skidoo pushes all the snow in front of you.... you are not on top of the snow. once it settles, it is so much easier...
it was a horrible day.... trees blowing down all around us....and 2 feet of wet new snow.

Wolves are an intregal part of nature.

photo from this spring.
You are right. They are an intregal part of the balance of nature. Without them the ungulates might over populate and over graze their winter grounds. But Wolves do have a high reproduction rate and can also over populate and they can have very detremental affects on the ungulates, causing large fluxuations in both predator and prey populations. Nature left alone is never a prefect balance... it's more like a pendulam with highs and lows.
The larger predators and game animal populations fluxuate much the same as rabbits, voles and lemmings. Rising to non-sustainable numbers and then crashing. So as man "The Super Predator" we must harvest equally amoung species or these fluxuations can accually wipe out some local species. For example we found a small creek on our trapline with 4 Beaver Colonies in 1/2 km. There are no poplars left, only a few small overgrazed willows. They are forced to go long distances from the creek to forage. Left unchecked in a year or two....these colonies will all winter kill. It doesn't matter if the predator is a wolf, a lynx , an otter or man.
There used to be Mountain Sheep within 15 Km of us. They were not huntable because of the access. The quideoutfitter for this area used to keep a count of them from his small plane. This was in the 70's 80's and early 90's .....first there was 9 ...then 7....then 3 and the last time he saw them there was only one left. .... now there are none left.....probably due to predators (wolves, Bears) combined with unusually high amounts of snow. This is how mother nature really works.
Wolves and Bears have the capability to move on.... to greener pastures when a prey or species crashes. Sheep, Goats and Cariboo and Moose (to a degree) do not have that option. So a reasonable amount of trapping and hunting of these large predators makes common sense to me.

Lone Wolf howling....Mtn Goats leave

Four Mountain Goats. Hard to see .....2 at top in centre frame ...one on left half way down.. other one down in bottom half of fram on right .....look for beige circles on white.

Bryan was hanging a Marten Box on the Goat Loop near Moose Pond when all of a sudden a Lone Wolf howled 200 yards away. It seemed like it was howling at the nail hammering. For 10 minutes it howled every minute, starting out hi then ending very very low. We crossed his trail into the Loop near the smaller moose meadow.
We often check the Bear Mountain for tracks with binoculars. We had noticed a new set on the far side of the canyon above the Lodge that morning. Didn't look like Moose because it was travelling far too straigth a path. This is where we had seen the Lone Wolf this last May.....at that time we followed his progress for over 2 hours chasing Groose for a km across the Bear Mountain. The evening after hearing the howling there was also a new set of tracks heading up the Mountain to the left of the Mountain Goats. The Wolf must have gone up there to see if he could get lucky. The eight Nannies and Kids had recently been joined by a Billy and the nine had been up there in the snow for well over 3 weeks. Now there is only a trail heading up to the high mountains further north of us. They have gone.
The next day at another area of the lake there was fresh wolf track so he mustn't have followed the Goats which makes us happy.

First Skidoo Trip

Bryan's out setting up the first Skidoo trail. I'm sitting here at dark in candlelight so that I can hear his sled return. It is easier the first trip of the year if he doesn't have to look back to see if I am still following. There is no real base to the snow yet. Last year I sprained my wrist on the 1st trip out on the bad hill loop that loops up the hill around a large rock knob on the lake trail. We'd planned on fixing that spot but hadn't yet. The loop is bad sidehill and on an outside curve you have to make an immediate right. I had to stay home for a month to heal the sprain and we didn't want that to happen again. Bryan got home at 7 pm ...said it was a hard trip. not enough snow under the big trees yet.... his 550 Scandic longtrack tipped over on him once. He had put out 10 Marten boxes on the way out and on his return was rewarded by a nice Marten.

Muskrat...the event of the day. by Bryan

I found a muskrat run in the reeds at the edge of the lake. I decided to set 3 110 conibears than I cut 3 green alder sticks for trap stakes. I rigged one conibear and put it in the run. Now this process usually takes me 10 minutes to set 3 traps in the run. I was rigging the 2nd trap when I noticed the 1st stake was wiggling, so I took it out and sure enough I had a muskrat already....so I pulled the trap and muskrat and replaced it with the newly rigged set and went back on shore to take the muskrat out and rig up that last stake. This process happened again and again. Ended up taking me 40 minutes to rig the set and I only left 2 traps..... But I walked away with 4 muskrats and a BIG GRIN. Bryan

We respect the Hardworking Beavers

Beavers started this lake house in August. You can see by the pics how much work it was to get the Poplar trees off the steep hills and drag them into the lake. Beavers are not that modile on land and that is when the Wolf, Lynx and Wolverine get their chance. Since the snow fall last week they have been out busily collecting poor wood like Alder to put up on the top of the cache to force the good wood further down into the lake. How they understand that 40" of ice is coming is hard to understand. We don't trap our lake Beaver or Otter. We enjoy seeing them so much. There are 3 big colonies a km north of us on little swamps where we will take 2 Beaver this year for lure making and bait. Once we can trap down on the Sutlahine River there are thousands of Beavers down there. Beavers near towns and cottages can be a nuisance alright but they are so neat to see the work they do.

Your Comments are like a friendly WAVE

Your comments on our daily life out here are like receiving a friendly wave from a near-by neighbour. It means a great deal to us. Thank you Vikki and Bryan

Checking our sets this morning brought us 4 muskrat and a nice male mink...5 out of 6 set is not bad.