Here in the Arctic.
The preferred time to cut
firewood is the spring.
The reason for that is
you still have enough snow
that I can use my snow machine
to access my wood cutting yard.
If I waited until the summer,
I’d be limited to what I can do on foot
a real nice wooden cutting yard
and I’m able to get there on snow machine
and snow machine, only
hoping to cut enough firewood right now
that it’ll get me through
that first part of the fall
this next year
until there’s enough
snow that I can again
be riding my snow machine
and cut more firewood.
This is where I cut
firewood here on this island.
We’re on sort of a tight
little slew of the river here.
This is a backwater, a flood channel.
This is the first tree
I want to take today.
Here, we’re targeting dead
standing spruce.
It’s already dry and it’s ready to go.
Get this home
to our right in the woodstove.
When you burn exclusively firewood
to heat your home,
you need a lot of firewood.
So what you do to get
the wood is you come out in your girdle
these trees,
which is the marks that you see here.
Girdling it.
It cuts the xylem of the tree.
It exposes it. It kills the tree.
And then the tree sits out
here in the woods. It dries standing.
And a few years later,
when you come back to cut them,
it’s already dry and ready to go.
You always got to pay attention,
when you get one hung up like that.
See, there’s that loose top up there.
Not really though because it’s going to roll this way.
It’s not like bullshit.
It is going to fall here in the next
cut or two.
That tree was not leaning
in an advantageous direction.
Well, I got a full load
on my sled.
We got several piles
back there with some more wood.
I’m going to hold this back to camp.
I just came out here,
travel down the river
a short distance from my home,
cut some firewood.
I filled up
my sled
amid several other piles along the slope.
So that all worked out.
I knocked over a couple of trees here
and got them all limned up,
locked up and lanked.
I’m going hall them back to my camp,
buck them up, split them,
throw them in the woodshed there, and
we’re good to go.
Wood, to
me, is
one of the most valuable commodities
there are out here in the bush.
I mean, it’s how I heat my house.
What I just did here
is basically everybody else in the world
going out to their to their desk job,
working their week, punching their clock,
and then giving it to the heating oil man
for the winter to pay for heat,
your house, propane, heating oil.
However, I’d much rather
cut out the middleman
and just go and get my own
my own heating fuel here.
