Basically, mature and immature bears are patrolling around the base, and one large female is literally camped out on or under their building, waiting for them. They've run out of flares to scare them off, and lost a sled/guard dog (poor thing) as well.
Bet on the bears - they were there first.
It's not unusual for polar bears to approach human outposts in the Arctic, where waste is often difficult to dispose of and attracts carnivorous predators. The phenomenon has intensified, though, due to climate change.
Arguably this is related to climate change - but arguably, hairless apes wandering the Arctic wilderness are much tastier and easier to kill and eat than seals, especially when the sea ice hasn't formed up yet.
During my summer as a Maine Appalachian Trail caretaker, I was "privileged" to take part in an event called "a mixer". All 4 caretakers, plus some MATC volunteers, converged on the Horns Pond shelter area for a mid-year roundtable summit, a bit of a swim, and some hard, disgusting labor.
Horns Pond is high up on the Bigelow Range, and the thin alpine soil offer the traditional outhouse/privy dynamic; the waste won't decompose due to the lower temperatures and lack of organic matter. So, the MATC has two composing privvies.
These do not compost themselves. This is a thoroughly disgusting process.
In early summer, the caretakers and volunteers backpack many 40-50 lb. bags of mulch up the famed Firewarden's Trail, aka the MATC Stairmaster.
There are two privvies, each set high up on the edge of a hill and over a very large galvanized tub. The entire area behind the privvies is roped off with biohazard signs, and it's on the downhill lie from the pond and spring which serve as the water sources. The "droppings" fall down into the tubs. Here's where its important not to throw trash into the privvies. When full, volunteers don goggles, aprons, thick gloves, masks, and slather Vicks Vapo-Rub under their noses for the smell, and shovel forkfulls of mulch into the "droppings", at the same time picking out the Coke cans, wine bottles, flashlights and tampons from the more biodegradable stuff. These are all bagged in multiple layers of plastic for pack-out. Once there's a good amount of neutral carbon-based mulch/chips turned into the droppings, they're emptied out into covered compost bins.
At this point the volunteers are pretty much done. Throughout the process, people manning water bottles are providing drinks so that no one touches their water bottles. The workers frequently swap rubber gloves as the fingertips literally fill and overflow with liquid sweat. Everyone washes their boots in bleach, and changes clothes - if you do all this in full sun you end up soaked to the skin, as everything you wear is impervious. Fortunately, the Horns Pond is nearby, and a nice chilly 50 degrees or so.
The full-time caretakers then monitor the temperature of the compost piles, ensuring that they heat up enough to kill off all the bad bacteria, turning and managing as needed. Once this happens for enough time, the now-composted mixture is spread out on screens to dry. As it dries, the newly formed 'soil' falls from the chips, and once dry, the chips are further rakes to further separate the new soil from the chips; the chips are used again. The soil is then manually dispersed throughout the area.
Next time you're up near treeline and there's a privy, give silent (or vocal!) thanks to the caretakers who quite literally, shovel your shit.
Here's a video from 2014, MATC is now using a rototiller (who packed THAT up the mountain?) to do the mixing. Not sure I entirely support the mechanized, and LOUD equipment, but it probably does a more thorough job.
Every year I gobble up a few tanks of propane making syrup from the maples on my property. Because I have mostly red and swamp maple, whose sugar content is in the .5-1.5 percent range, I have to boil a lot of sap.
Side note: I've planted sugar maple saplings that I bought from the Arbor Day people, but that's 8-10 years out.
Given the massive amounts of wood, brush, and a stand of girdled trees that I've slowly been harvesting, I have "free" fuel. Boiling my own sap with my own wood as fuel using recycled parts gives me "free" maple syrup, manages brush on my property, is carbon-neutral, and is a great hobby.
I purchased the Vogelzang barrel stove kit from Northern Tool, and today took advantage of the 40 degree (F) weather and installed it. Total time about 2 hours, and I only cut myself on the sharp metal once. The kit has the cast iron feet, front door and an adapter/damper for a 6" pipe.
Tools you will need:
Drill with a small and a 5/16" bit
Jigsaw/Sawzall with a metal cutting blade (or 2)
Magic marker for marking your cuts
Beefy phillips-head screwdriver
Cleverness at filling in the blanks on the instructions
Total cost: free barrel (but look on Craigslist, $25-40 is the norm), $51 for kit incl. shipping, 2 bags of play sand and 2 lengths of 6" pipe, total $80.
Instructions were good, not even chinglish, but left many small details out. If you've built things and are handy this is not a problem. If you are looking for IKEA-like detail, seek help or look elsewhere.
Ear plugs are a must. One thing I found is that unless you punch all the holes first, they'll have a tendency to 'walk' while you're drilling, and nothing will line up. What I did was get the parts on with 2 or 3 screws, then used the holes in the Vogelzang castings to line up the drill - everything went together perfectly.
Once assembled, I put a few inches of sand in the bottom and lit it up. Worked like a charm, exactly as I had imagined it would. At one point the surface temperature was 800 degrees (F). It had a pretty funky paint smell for a bit. I let it burn down, I'll scrape the charred paint off later, and maybe hit it with a can of stove paint. Next step will be to attach a shelf to hold the pan of sap (stainless steel steam-table tray). I can taste the syrup now.
Microtrash is always a big problem, and rare is the trip I take without coming home with a cargo-pants pocket full of it. Common offenders are cigarette butts, corners of Clif/Snickers/Nature Valley bars, crumbs of those ubiquitous blue foam pads, and the occasional bandaid. Note, I never pick up toilet paper, so ladies, please try and pee farther away than right next to the trail.
Macrotrash is a little more of an interesting dilemma. You see either modern dumpsites at trailheads (tires, beer cans) or you find 'historic' items rusting away at an old cabin site, or the remains of a can dump at an old shelter. Sometimes its piles of trash, and unsightly, or its in high traffic areas where it encourages more trash. Here's a case where a very busy caretaker in the Maine Applachian Trail Club cleaned up a massive amount of really bad trash. I helped carry down some big rusty iron bits on my way down the Firewarden's Trail (totally overwhelming my pack's suspension, but worth it). http://www.matc.org/assets/Resolved-Refuse-Removal-ATJourneys-MarApr2014.pdf
I can live with some of it, things like this I found in the desert of southern California. It adds a certain atmosphere, and has some historical value. This area was actively mined for gold.
But what kills me is the modern "woodsman's" trash. Plastic garbage bags left behind. Propane cannisters. Toilet paper. 5 gallon buckets of poop. Benches, tables, chairs hacked together with local lumber and plywood. When I was a caretaker on the AT in Maine, I once packed out nearly a full black trashbag, just from a single hike ~40 miles and hitting 3 shelters. Unacceptable!
These are the things that say "This area is actively used. It is not wild, whatever you thought you were going to see. It's a campsite, a playground, a city park. It's to be used and consumed, not preserved or saved for the next person. We beat you to it, so suck it."
It was a beautiful day, so I did some tramping in the uplands behind the property. It's old farmland, now regrown, and logged for hardwoods about 25 years ago. Great old stone walls, some interesting ruts and leftover trees from the logging operations, and some trails - some manmade, some machinemade, and some game trails.
Nice, right?
I kept walking, encountering a few beer cans along the way, and then this:
Kind of a buzzkill.
Folks, clean up after yourself, the next guy deserves the same experience you do.
The cherry tomatoes are going full speed these days, so I took 4 quarts of them and decided to save them as sauce. Since I'm the only one eating it, I get to make it how I like.
All fresh from the garden this year, I'm doing:
yellow cherry tomatoes
a few red tomatoes that happened to be ripe
yellow squash
zucchini
red onion
basil
garlic
olive oil
The olive oil is the only thing I couldn't make myself. Maybe when I finish the grape jelly in a few weeks, I could try making grapeseed oil.... but probably not.
Given that there's non-tomato stuff in the sauce, I figured I'd need to pressure can it, so I skipped the vinegar/lemon juice.
Half the batch, with the pressure cooker warming up in the back. Electric stoves just don't have the punch that gas ones do. It took around 20 minutes to go from boiling up to 10psi.
I ended up with quarts of sauce, a little watery since I didn't simmer it down endlessly (not wanting to mush the zucchini).
Growing your own food and canning it is a great way to reduce your Trace - you can use your own composted scraps as soil ammendment, the vegetables don't travel via truck anywhere, you're reusing the canning jars, and come winter you have a healthy sauce (all my stuff is organic) with no extra sugar, thickeners, or crap.
As I previously mentioned on Google Plus (here) I'm making rhubarb wine based on the recipe I found here. The must went in sweet and slightly syrupy, and I was afraid I was making sugar water. I siphoned off the liquid today, getting a faceful of alcohol and yeast odors, and just over a gallon of pale, cloudy yellow wine.
It's strong, like a good dry Pinot Grigio, but only with a hint of rhubarb. I worry that the grape concentrate and sugar are basically overwhelming the rhubarb. We'll see in another few weeks or so when secondary fermentation completes and it clears.
I might do some campden tablets + juice (strawberry?) to give it some sugar and color.
We did about 275 people and we disposed of
20,407 pounds of household hazardous waste, included was 9 thermostats and 15 pounds of
mercury, 150 pounds of bulbs, 75 pounds of CFLs and 15 pounds of
sharps. Also this number does not include any paint
disposed of under the Paintcare program (probably another 12,000
pounds)!
It cost the town nothing - but the RI Resource Recovery Corp spent almost $15000 to run this.
As the garden is under siege from leaf miners, potato beetles and slugs, and the apples are under attack from tent and gypsy moth caterpillars, I've decided to get into natural pest control methods.
Slugs were the most interesting. They were doing a number on my strawberries, and last year devoured my cucumber seedlings in 1 night. I read that you can leave a board on the ground, and they'll crawl under it. Then you simply pick up the board and get rid of the slugs. Since it takes > 1 day for a slug to grow, if you do this daily after a few days you've knocked down the lion's share of the slugs. In dry weather I had no luck, only crickets seemed interested in hiding under the board. After yesterday's rain, however, I went out and saw this on the bottom of the board:
I figured I'd let the circle of life complete, so I brought the board up to the chix. Oddly, they weren't terribly interested. But after I put some scratch on the board, they came racing over.
Later I went back up and almost all the slugs were gone, so I think they got the idea.
The apple trees are getting devoured by tent caterpillars, and today I saw them on the poplars as well. So I busted out the Neem oil, mixed up a gallon and sprayed everything that I could reach.
I did the plants in the garden as well; eggplant, squash/zucchini, pumpkin, potatoes, hot peppers and strawberries. I skipped the onions, garlic and carrots since they seemed immune. So, I either killed the plants, or in a few days when the bugs eat the plants, they'll drop dead. But, it's better than spraying poison.
I'm also going to put Tanglefoot on as a way to keep the trees safe from the caterpillars.
If folks don't have a good place to bring this stuff, it gets dumped in
the woods. There's a lot of lonely dirt roads in our town. We filled an entire truck with hazardous waste containers, and overflowed a shipping container with e-waste. Beautiful day for it - next year we're doing paper shredding as well, and there will be refreshments! Thanks to the Town of Foster DPW team, the Town of Foster Conservation Commission, and the RI Resource Recovery Corporation.
Vernal, or Ephemeral, pools are temporary ponds which form due to wet weather conditions, and provide critical shelter for animals and plants. Because they are small and shallow, they cannot support fish populations from year to year, which makes them prime breeding areas for amphibians. With the worldwide crash in amphibian populations (climate change, pollution, environmental estrogens) each pristine vernal pool is literally an oasis in a desert. That these pools remain unspoiled is critical, only cool clear water will effectively support the reproductive cycle. They also provide critical protein sources to other woodland animals such as racoons, skunks, mink and coyote.
A while back I got to volunteer as part of the Wood/Pawcatuck Watershed Association (http://www.wpwa.org/) who was conducting a field survey of all identified vernal pools in the watershed. They were doing this off old aerial photos - anything dark and pond-like from the air got GPS coordinates determined, and then pairs of volunteers went out and did surveys for things like water clarity and temperature, count and description of animals, lists of any environmental threats like dumped trash or runoff, etc. It was a blast, and I got to walk around on a few thousand acres of privately held and protected land. My partner and I had good luck and got a lot of data. I'm attaching some pictures.
Urinating in the shower saves water and paper waste, also reduces point-source pollution ("the solution to pollution is dilution", allowing for natural environmental processes to break it down. I'm not sure I could do it though.
Where I live now we have a well and septic system that basically puts the water right back into the ground. The well uses quite a bit of electricity to pull the water up 100s of feet from the ground, this could be a money saver as well as a time saver.
I met Ian last year while camping at the Horns Pond shelter area. He single-handedly triggered an avalanche of volunteer work which cleaned up an old Fire Warden's cabin site (of which I played one small part). Over the years the place had been completely trashed out.
The MATC caretakers at Horns Pond in Maine also perform another critical duty - they compost human waste. At altitude the temperature is too low and the soil is too thin for normal microbial activity to do it, so they backpack (literally) tons of bark chips up the mountain, mix it into giant tubs of waste, and compost it. Anything non-biodegradable (soda cans, tampons, etc) they pick out and then pack down to town.
I recently joined the town of Foster Conservation Commission. I'm looking forward to working with the Land Trust, Planning Board and Northern RI Conservation District.
Later this year we'll be running a program for town members to build and install bat houses on their properties. Bats face a number of challenges including loss of habitat, "white nose syndrome" and light pollution. By installing bat houses in suitable areas you can help give them as many chances as possible.
Another initiative we're taking on is the conversion of the Town truck fleet and heating oil usage to "BioHeat", or a blend of biodiesel and traditional fuel. This offers increased efficiencies, reduced pollution, reduced carbon footprint, and provides an opportunity to use fuel produced right here in RI. Many municipalities around the country run their heavy vehicle fleet on biodiesel blends, and I have run it in my car.
In the name of science. People are looking to drop drones into hurricanes to better study them. Where do all the shredded parts end up, including all the good lithium ion and other interesting chemicals in the batteries? As someone who lives on the East Coast, I understand the destructive power of hurricanes, and the need to track them, but given that a) you can't do anything about them anyway, and b) we have dozens of different radar/photo images of the hurricanes, and c) years of modeling data already, why throw millions of dollars of plastic into the Gulf Stream?
I'm putting the finishing touches on the garden this year, recovering it from a year of disuse. This entailed a lot of digging, leveling, picking and raking. The previous owner had the rows going perpendicular to the gradient of the hill, which ensured standing water on the high side of each row. This gave rise to the notion that "the area isn't good for a garden". Newly levelled with rows at about a 30 degree angle to the gradient, I think I have a better chance.
I have an early harvest - a harvest of trash that is. The previous owner was a no-till/lasagna gardener. A great, labor-saving idea provided you have the right materials; alternating layers of "green" and "brown" compost separated by paper/cardboard/etc. What is not part of the equation, is all the plastic packing tape attached to said cardboard. Combining the torn and rotten cardboard and the plastic tape I ended up with two full wheelbarrows of trash. The weeds and other organic material (and bits of cardboard too far gone) ended up raked into a corner, uphill from the garden so that as they rot the nutrients flow downhill. Here's the last pile (along with a lot of smallish rocks which I've raked out of the beds).
As you can see there's little shreds of non-degrading plastic all over the place. Put a rake down, drag it over the ground, and you find some. While you can argue that it helps keep the soil from clumping, so does sand.
Ok, rant over. This fall I'm probably going to adopt some kind of lasagna technique to cover up the garden for winter. I don't mind the odd mouse nest (hey it's just nitrogen) and it will help the worms winter over. One thing I've used in the past is that "contractor paper" - the heavy brown kraft style paper which you can get at your local Big Box store. I'll smother that with the last few batches of lawn clippings and be good to go.
Moral: Plastic is not compostable!
The garden is almost ready. The total fenced area is about 1800 sq ft, but I'm only cultivating about 1000 sq ft. The rest will be used for chickens. I have a 6' wide path around the garden area, which I call the "chicken moat" - no bugs will be safe. How is this related to LNT? Plan Ahead and Prepare, and Dispose of Waste Properly - by growing food that I need, and composting the chaff, I reduce my overall footprint - my Trace, if you will.
Here's the main garden area - note the birdfeeder, which allows me to convert seed into nitrogen.
Next up is the old potato garden - a little wet, but the previous owner pulled 75 lbs of potatoes out of it. Clearly needs a little help.
Separate and up near the house is the berry patch and rhubarb.
Mint appears impossible to kill. Despite being repeatedly mowed last year, it's roaring back up.
Some ornamental quince - we got some fruit out of it last year, hard as a
rock. It's super high in pectin however, so it's going to get added
to my jams and jellies. The hummingbirds are fond of the red blooms.
No pictures of the herb garden, but the garlic, sage and oregano is exploding already. It all overwintered, which surprised me. The rosemary died, which also surprised me but I guess it's not hardy in this zone - and last winter was a doozy.
Absent any recent knowledge about chemistry, and also a pre-21st century mindset that the world was large, and that actions in 1 place don't impact others, they dumped chemical weapons into the ocean.
Factory farming is a huge breeding ground for bacteria and disease, and the rapid turnover of the animals once they reach slaughter size speeds the generational process. Couple this with non-local feed sources (China) where you have little control over the conditions where the food is produced, and it's frankly surprising that this doesn't happen more often.
Intensive farming practices like this exceed the capacity of the environment to absorb the changes, leading to issues with runoff and pollution. A measured approach to reduction of meat consumption is the only way out of this bind.
