What Month is This?

Surely this can't be August. I must be confused. This morning when I got up there was frost in one of my lettuce patches. And investigating something stuffed in my mailbox, I see that we have received the Sear's Christmas Wish Book. What month is this???

Fish and Fowl

Former neighbours of ours own an organic farm out of town and today was chicken butchering day. I volunteered to help. As a farm girl growing up, I certainly did my fair share of this sort of work and in a strange way, I miss it. I find that the more I know about where my food comes from, how it lived, and how it died, the greater reverence I have for it.

The Rudges had quite an assembly line going, with areas for butchering, plucking, removing head and feet, gutting, final cleaning, weighing and bagging. I was on gutting duty. We took care of more than 200 chickens and then it was time for a late lunch: soups, fresh bread, salad (using greens from their garden of course) and various fruits and desserts. At the end of the day I left with a dozen chickens for my freezer.

While I was looking after our winter fowl supply, Joe was heading for Alaska to fish for salmon and halibut. Valdez, Alaska is one of the few places that has healthy salmon runs, thanks to a very successful hatchery program.

My we are going to eat well this year!

Eat the View

There's a move afoot in the United States to get the next president to grow vegetables on the lawn of the White House. You can learn more about it here, but the idea is to have the First Family grow enough food not only for themselves but for local food banks in Washington, D.C.

That got me thinking about our own situation here in the Yukon. There is quite a large patch of lawn at the back of the Yukon legislature...enough for an ample garden to feed quite a few people. Since a Yukon food bank is supposed to open its doors by the end of this year and work is underway to find a permanent youth shelter, there would certainly be a 'market' for the produce. I suspect there would be a number of Yukon government workers who would be willing to give up a portion of their lunch hours to plant, weed or water (it is after all theraputic work that could lead to more relaxed, satisfied employees) and the politicians could take turns tending the garden too. It could also be opened up to the general public to help out, including those who would benefit from receiving the food. It could help those most in need to learn a new skill and take some ownership for producing their own food. I think it would be a good thing on so many levels.

We happen to have a friend who is an MLA, so I put the bug in his ear last night when he came for dinner (a meal that was largely made up of food we had grown or gathered ourselves). If you're reading this and are interested in working with me to make this happen, please drop me a note.

Garden Supper

The garden is slowly and somewhat reluctantly starting to give up its bounty to us. Today we had our first potatoes and our first broccoli. Delicious!

That, My Dear, Was an Adventure!

Just got back from the Dempster Highway, and I must say I think I've had my share of excitement for a while. It was quite the trip, with ample bouts of joy and tragedy. Where to start? Chronologically I guess.

We had been on the road for about four hours when we came upon a Yukon government highway truck, lights flashing and door open. As we got closer we saw a man lying in the middle of the road. We stopped, as did a couple visiting from Germany. We did all the usual things, including CPR, but it was pretty obvious this man was gone. We called for help but of course cell phones are pretty touch and go in rural Yukon. After several attempts we did manage to get through to the closest nursing station. A tourist bus stopped with a doctor on board so he came to try to help. He surmised the man had had a massive heart attack.

So while we waited for the ambulance and RCMP, I directed traffic from one end and Joe and the German fellow from the other. In the midst of all this, a bit of absurdity: the German man mentioned he and his wife had seen the Frantic Follies the night before. Joe told him our daughter dances in the show, so the man's wife excitedly ran to get the program so Joe could point out which dancer was our daughter. Turns out they had taken pictures of her and promised to email them to us once they got back home. All this happy chat was going on while this poor man lay in the road. Anyway, I digress...

After an hour, the police and ambulance finally arrived, took statements, and we went on our way. It certainly put a damper on things though.

Several hours later, we arrived at our camp site on the Dempster and collapsed into our tent. It had been a long day. But the next day was going to prove to be even longer!

Up early on Sunday to battle the rain and the Dempster once again. It's had lots of rain this year as has the rest of the Yukon and the road was a total mess: thick soupy mud and pot hole after pot hole. I've never seen it so bad in all the years we've been making this trek. We came around a bend and there was our friend Darius, soaked and covered in mud, lying on his back under his vehicle. One of his tires had expoded and he couldn't get the spare out from under his vehicle, so we loaded him into our truck and headed on up to Eagle Plains to get a new tire. Joe then drove him back while I stayed at the hotel to get cleaned up. All of us were a soggy muddy mess by this point.

It was then that we came across this vehicle:

This fellow from Toronto was driving all over the place with his solar car, including the Dempster. I have no idea how he has been manoeuvering the road in the condition it's in (he apparently has about 70 spare tires but has only needed four of them so far). We spent some time chatting with him before continuing our treck north, in search of cloudberries.

We did find cloudberries - more than I've ever seen in my life in fact. But we also found caribou...a few hundred of them. I have never had the opportunity to see a large group like that and I was so excited. They are incredibly beautiful animals. But of course they are also our winter meat, so we were up before 5 the next morning hunting. Joe got two caribou (one for us and one for the elder he hunts for) so we spent four hours skinning, cutting up and packing the meat.

Just as Joe was starting to skin the animals, an old fellow from the Northwest Territories came tearing up the tundra. I have no idea what possessed him to drive on that kind of terrain - I guess he was excited at seeing all those caribou. But of course he got stuck BIGTIME! Joe and I pushed for a while, but he wasn't going anywhere without some major mechanical help. So we flagged down someone on the highway to go for help and we went back to dealing with the meat. It has to be taken care of quickly or the belly swells (heat from the intestines). As well, being in bear country means you don't want to hang around with fresh meat any longer than necessary. We did see a black bear and two cubs, and another single black bear, but not in that area. We also saw a moose, but I'm getting off topic.

The caribou was packed and covered with tarp but we still wanted berries so we spent the next couple of hours picking. We left relectantly after that point, again because we needed to get the meat home. We could have picked for days and not made a dent in the patch! As it was we picked about 12 litres, then back into the truck we went for the long 12 hour drive home. We arrived in Whitehorse last night just around 11. I'm exhausted today, but a good exhausted. The Dempster Highway takes good care of us, that's for sure! And every time I go there I am reminded that it has some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen in my life.

Dam Good Idea

This year is the 50th anniversary of the building of the Whitehorse dam, and it was my job to put on an all day 'event' to mark the occasion. That event took place yesterday. First there was a fun run across the dam and around the Millennium Trail. Back in the 70s when the Riverdale bridge was being repaired people drove across the dam to get to work and school. But it's been off limits ever since then because of safety and security reasons, so I think it was a treat for people to have a chance to go across it. We had about 150 show up for that and we had them all decked out in orange or blue t-shirts that read 'Dam Good Idea'.

Next we offered tours of one of the hydro plants. People had to pre-book and my phone didn't stop ringing for two days beforehand. I was amazed at just how many people were interested in seeing the facilities. What was really great was the number of old timers who came. Many of them had worked on the dam when it was built and so this visit really brought back memories for them. They told some amazing stories - far too many to recount here. I will mention that I looked over at one point to see one of these old fellows (I think he said he was 85) down on the ground doing push-ups for a reporter so he could show that he was still in great shape! And boy could he do push-ups: far more than I could do!

The day ended with a gathering by the dam, where there was lots of food, live music, old photo displays and stories told by some of the old timers and by elders who spoke of what it was like before the dam was built.

I heard many good comments so I think the event was a success. Several people said we should do this every year. Hmmm, I'm not sure I have the energy to do that (pardon the pun) but we'll have to see.

Now to switch gears:
Joe and I are off to the Dempster this week-end for our annual cloudberry search. As I write this, I have caribou ribs roasting in the oven, potatoes and eggs cooking for potato salad, several packages of various veggies in foil all ready to be thrown on the coals, a huge amount of fruit and cheese, and Joe has gone downtown to get the 'fill in the blanks' stuff. So even if we don't find any berries we'll certainly dine well.

Field trip to Carmacks

It's been a blur of a week, with many things demanding my time at work. I only have energy to write about one of those things now, with more to follow later.

This week I took a group of reporters to a fly-in site near Carmacks where an all-woman crew is hand digging holes for transmission poles. The area is a no-machine zone, meaning that all the work has to be done by hand or from the air. These women are digging holes that will end up being eight or nine feet deep and four to six feet across, using only shovels and other hand tools. The women do the first three or four feet and then a crew of men comes along and finishes digging to the required depth, again using only jackhammers and shovels. The poles themselves will be dropped into the holes by helicopters. I love the fact that women are doing what is some of the most physically demanding work on the line.

Here are a few pictures. The culverts you see in photo #1 weigh 300 pounds each and are set upright into the ground to hold the poles in place. The hole you see in photo #2 is deeper than I am tall. Notice the layer of white ash close to the surface...it's from an Alaskan volcano that erupted a few hundred years ago. Photos #3 and #4 are shots of some of the reporters at work.