Runaway Ice in Jasper Creek

It's one of those years again at Northwind Lodge.  Last year we had too much snow and brutally cold weather.  This year we're having mildly cold weather (in relative terms) and not enough snow.  For those who don't know it, we rely on snow to be an insulating layer against the cold.  With low snow levels, the cold can penetrate the ground something fierce.  In this neck of the woods, our frostline for building code purposes is 84" or seven feet down.  Unfortunately, that is easier said than done and I do recall a few years back with low snow and cold temps that some people had their septic tanks move upwards from frost making it beneath the tank and freezing the water in the dirt.  The lifting of the tank would result in either breaking the main sewer line to the tank from the home or making the main line now move upwards thereby affecting the flow into the tank.  The residual water remaining in the sewer line, would freeze and plug up making for many unpleasant moments in the homeowner's basement.  With no simple remedy, this sort of thing makes a long winter feel much longer because our frost doesn't usually leave the ground here until mid-May.  So, when I hear our southern brethren tell me that it is just as cold in the Twin Cities, 265 miles to the south, I don't really agree.  Seven feet of frost is just one of the indicators as to the differences in global reality.

For Northwind Lodge, our low snow presents a different kind of problem.  It is mainly in Jasper Creek.   As it flows so beautifully through our property in the summer, it haunts us and taunts us all winter long with threats of overflowing its banks to threaten several cabins. The last major event required taking a chainsaw and cutting a 600 foot long ditch from the bottom (at the lake) all the way past the top of the falls.  We cut the ditch about 10 inches wide with one guy on the saw and another guy on the chisel, popping these huge blocks of ice out of the 16" deep ditch.  When the block gets pried out of the ditch, it sometimes would slide like a 75 pound bobsled down the ice.  We had to watch so we didn't wipe each other out with plummeting ice blocks.  Then, the excess water on top of the glacier gets routed into the big ditch to better focus it's erosive qualities.

When, this first appeared that it was going to happen back in the early 2000's as I expressed my fear about having to solve the problem to Annette, Jackie and Curt, Annette lightly scoffed and told the employees that "Joe overreacts."  She did not realize that "Joe" had done this disaster preventing maneuver long before we had been married and was far from exaggerating.

When the day came that Curt and I began to chainsaw the river, Joe showed Curt how the whole procedure is done.  We take the oil out of the oiler and loosen the chain on the bar.  The saw has to cut backwards in order to be effective.  If you've never cut two 600 foot lines 16" deep into ice climbing up a veritable glacier in screaming wind with your wool pants turned into ice stove pipes, you have not lived.  After Day One of the ice attack, Curt reported to work the next day with stories of brushing his teeth by jumping up and down while Jackie held the toothbrush to his teeth.  His arms were so tired from sawing, chiseling, prying, and sliding huge blocks of ice, that he couldn't hold his tooth brush.

We would finish with the ditch and in less than two days of -20 F, the ditch we cut would disappear completely as if we weren't even there with chainsaw in hand.  Then, we'd do it all over again.  I would cut, chisel, and ditch for hours after the employees left for home, trying to stay ahead of that incessant water.  Some nights I would go out with a head lamp and work some more in the dark.  At the time, we had the lodge open for skiers and the water was heading so hard to Cabin 8, that we put down sand bags that the county gave us to fight the onslaught.  Nothing says "wonderful experience" more than hand-shoveling salt-sand into jaggedy sand bags in a county gravel pit with the wind howling in below zero temps.  

We stacked the bags to re-direct the water and it built up against those bags almost immediately.  The ultimate was when a party from the Twin Cities arrived at an ungodly hour on a Friday night as opposed to a sensible check in time because they don't realize the issues that can surround wilderness existence.  I watched and waited for them and somehow they sneaked by me and parked their Subaru in five inches of ice water, front wheels right up to a row of stacked sandbags.  At midnight, I decided to get out of bed, get dressed and go over to their cabin to see if they arrived.  Sure, enough, they had been there, meeting up with the rest of their party (who KNEW all about the river, the ice, the water, etc.) and they parked their car and were in the cabin "shooting the bull" for hours.

The water was freezing almost to the rims of all four wheels and had to be encroaching the differential on the vehicle.  I knocked on the cabin door and suggested that the owner move their vehicle to a place that is high and dry for the 25 below night we were having or we'd be chiseling that car out of the ice by morning.  They thought it was kind of funny while not realizing how bad it really could have been.  I could not believe that they would park their car with their wheels in the water -anywhere- let alone at a cabin deep in the northwoods.  I just shook my head at the obliviousness that permeates so much of city-dwelling humankind.

One day, when the river was really kicking our butts and we couldn't get ahead of it, I asked 
Annette to don ice creepers and help with chiseling ditches.  She did; it helped immensely and that evening she was completely shot from pounding an ice chisel and climbing up and down a veritable mountain of unforgiving ice for about 5 hours.

And, by that point, nobody thought I was exaggerating about the creek anymore.  

Here's a video of our New Year's Eve efforts to try to stay ahead of the potential nightmare that it could yet become.  This is plan B and it should work.  I don't know what Plan C is yet and I hope I won't need it.

Happy New Year from Joe and Annette Baltich at Northwind Lodge, Ely MN.

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Dogs...

What a morning start on New Year’s Eve.  I let both dogs out while I was building a fire  in the basement trying to get the day going.    It’s  1 degree above zero and feels like T-shirt weather to both me, Cookie and Delilah compared to yesterday.    While I had the fire going and it looked like it would continue, I went out to look for both dogs.  Warm outside or not,  I still did not want them to wander off because we have a wolf pack in the area.   Upon calling, Delilah came snorting full speed out of nowhere, happy to see me like I’d been gone for a month.   Cookie was nowhere to be found.   I called for that stubborn, fluffy Pekingese and she’s nowhere.   This is unusual because she’s usually the rock that guards the palace gates, sitting in front of the store doors keeping a lookout for anything unusual.   Upon sighting something unusual, she would then do absolutely nothing like a large, fat, house cat.  Maybe she’d bark and if it was a car coming down the ice hill which is our driveway, she’d charge directly at it expecting the panicked driver to garner complete control at all times despite the road conditions.    I still have not determined if that dog is fearless or just plain dumb.

I thought of where she might be and headed up to the back of my house.  Our back deck is the default position for when she decides it is time everyone needs to run around looking for Cookie in a panic.  Walked up the hill and turned right I did and there she sat on the deck looking like she was asking “What?”.   I told her to come down and when she stood up from her sitting position, I saw it:  the Christmas tree from Hell.  Big, fluffy furry mass with dog poop ornaments of all sizes flailing about with every indignant, Pekingese, flip of her tail.  “Ugh – what am I gonna do?”, I thought to myself.  Of course, Annette was safely in our van heading for Hibbing, MN to be a substitute beauty school teacher for the day and I had a really, REALLY messy dog full of fur and poopsicles who was not listening to anything I was saying.

I proceeded to chase Cookie around the parking lot with a dust pan, trying to sever the connection of fur and flailing turds by driving the edge of the dust pan into the snow below.  With each fur-ripping yank, Cookie was having little to none of it.  Delilah was bouncing around us thinking we’re all having a great time in the northern Minnesota wilderness.  I was speaking my second language in which I’m very fluent:  swearing.

Well, I was overall unsuccessful at best,  but I did manage to remove some of the offending squishy mess from that errant show dog.   I finally resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to take her up into the house and give her a bath.  Using Delilah as gullible bait, I called her in and she bounded up the basement steps and Cookie, a creature of rigid habit, followed Delilah up into the living room. 

Not being able to control each part of the operation at hand, I got a smaller tub in the bathtub, filled it with warm water and doggy shampoo, donned some rubber gloves that went up to my neck, and proceeded to go find that dirty dog.  In those five minutes of prep-time, Cookie managed to travel to the living room and the bedroom leaving particles of poop and fur here and there.   Like little adobe bricks, they fortunately held their shape and didn’t get a chance to soak into the carpeting.  But, now I’m trying to catch and pick up a dog who wants to be neither caught nor picked up.  Run all over the house we did as I tried to corner that stinky furball.   Delilah watched in utter confused fascination not knowing the final fate to befall Cookie.   I finally cornered the 22 lb. Pekingese and while she snarled like a Tasmanian Devil, I bravely dove in, picked her up, kept her away from my face while hauling her to the other side of the building.   Fortunately, she being a normal girl, the act of taking baths is a true luxury and once she hit the warm, soapy water in the tub,  she did her short-nosed snuffle which I interpret to be the equivalent of “Ahhhhhh….Calgon, take me away!”    With that, the intense scrubbing of private doggy  parts and fur with blue rubber gloves on, began.

It was squishy, warm and wet  and felt  pretty much just  like gutting a deer, but I got that fir very clean.  I rinsed, re- applied copious amounts of shampoo to try to smooth out the matting, rinsed again thoroughly and toweled her dry.

Her tail turned into a Rastafarian dread-lock.  It became a fur rope.  I found a dog comb and tried to take the knots out but I was met with more Tasmanian indignation.   Not quite knowing what to do, I dug in a drawer and found the dullest, most worthless pair of scissors in the house – why we own them, I cannot say.  I then proceeded to cut off about 6 inches of her furry tail.  I was careful to not hit any important parts, but that, which was a  large, stylish, flippy part of her tail, is now gone.   Then, I decided to solve yet another problem and basically took the world’s dullest scissors to Cookie’s nether regions which were spotlessly clean, and I did the equivalent of a bikini trim – or at least, that is my guess, having never actually performed a bikini trim on neither human nor beast to this very day.

When I was done, I must say that my grooming and trim of Cookie looks like the equivalent of a “bowl cut” in yesteryear’s group-home environment.    It certainly was not the 5-Point Sassoon pixie cut that Annette masters so brilliantly on many of her clients by their request, but in my defense, it got the job done.   I may have even re-defined dog-styling.   Her tail is definitely shorter and there is now a poop-chute. 

Jackie just got in for the morning and upon inspection of Cookie,  broke out laughing at Cookie’s tail and suggested that I not take up dog grooming as a secondary profession.    I explained that it is obviously not Sassoon, but more of a “functional cut”.

 

I can’t wait until my hair-stylist wife sees it.