Saturday, February 18, 2017

Winter Family day camping

Jenn and I set out at 10:00 to the forests in the south end of the city (the same spot Andon and I tested out the four season tent) We hiked about a kilometer to the site, our sleds packing the trail real good. The weather was amazing, 6 degrees celsius and sunny in February when it is usually in the minus twentys. Jenn packed the spot for the tent down with her snowshoes while I downed a dead black spruce. Jenn took over the cutting for me and I set off and put up the Arctic bell tent. For the last 5 years I've had the tent I've been setting it up the hard way. After seeing online the correct way to set the tent it took a lot less time and effort. I then assembled the woodstove and cut a bipod for the stove pipe. Jenn and I then went about bringing the wood, spruce boughs and gear into the tent and at 16:00 I started the fire and cooked lazy man's cabbage rolls. I got to do some testing of the BK-7 by batoning some decent sized wood into kindling and shaving down some feathersticks. I de-limbed a spruce for some boughs for underneath my bedroll. I was highly impressed with the BK-7's performance. Around dusk some black capped chickadees started to visit the camp so we set some trailmix out for them and before long they were hopping around on guy lines and coming up to the entrance. We settled down for the night and around 01:00 a digging sound from the side of the tent woke us up and Jenn made a noise and scared off the mysterious creature,  about 10 mins later it revealed itself a Fox starting barking a short distance away as though scolding us.
I slept through the rest of the night waking a couple times to stoke the fire. We woke around 07:00 to the fire at a slow smolder and trying to stoke it was falling each time, I noticed smoke coming out from the damper holes and knew the problem as it has happened a couple times before. I crawled outside and pulled the spark arrester out and it was completely crusted over with creosote,  as soon as I pulled the arrester free a whoosh sounded and the fire flared up immediately. I cooked some sausages and bacon for breakfast and we relaxed and bit and then broke camp and headed home.

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