Christmas?

Christmas is coming!

For me this is a time of year for reflection. As the snow builds on the ground my environment becomes more and more insular.  Walks in the woods are serene, almost silent and visitors to the house are fewer and fewer as weather becomes bad for driving.

This is my time to think back about the year that has past and the year yet to come...

I revel in the serenity of the season!

A time for me to hibernate at home and cook game and read book after book.

A time to enjoy the wood I have cut burning in the fire...warming my house and heart.

This year warm weather however has thrown a nix in my seasonal routine!

The snow, try as it may has not yet arrived. This mornings weather is full of fog and rain. 

Making the best of the situation I decided to revisit an old tradition of bringing my daughter to "See Santa" with a modern twist.

A forty minute drive from my house there is a town where Christmas has a different meaning....

An after dark visit to this somewhat bizarre landscape provided for a fun evening!

By day you would never know this environment exists....

All of the inflated hot air fabric sculptures are turned off causing them to collapse flat on the ground and the lights are turned off...but the evening reveals this"magical christmas wonderland"

Complete with a santa who drops his pants!

Ho Ho Ho!

-Martin

As tough as old boots!

This post is about boots...
my boots...

I recently wore out a "newly puchased" pair of boots for the bush in less than a year, and that got me wondering what makes one pair of boots better than another for durability...

Boots are in my mind the quintissential utility footware...
Made to be used under harsh conditions people wear them when their enviroment is severe...
I live in boots in the bush which protect my feet from rocks,  stumps on the forest floor, from mud, water,  the elements and also shield my scent from the animals I hunt...

I depend on my boots!

Indispensable, practical, and sometimes even aesthetic in a form follows function sort of way...
Boots have become part of our modern lexicon
associated with phrases like:

get the boot
die in ones boots
you can bet your boots 
and 
as tough as old boots

Old boots in the past have been seen as strong and resilient items.

People that are "as tough as old boots" are said to be the same...

But really when it comes to actual boots some old boots are tougher than others, and these days some old boots are not tough at all!

Here are some of my old boots...

The pair on the left are close to twenty tears old...their treads are slick from wear and up until recently the boots were waterproof.

A good pair of boots should last you a while...especially a pair of boots made for the bush.

The other pair of boots that I am holding in the photo above on the right side of the picture are only one year old but have holes and leak!

I patched these new boots but at only a year old they have proved themselves not up to the rigours of my life in the woods.

"caveat emptor"

(let the buyer beware)

If you want a good pair of boots do some research before you make a purchase.

All these boots in these photos are a "Baffin style" boot.

This is my favourite style of boot to wear in the woods. 

Sort of like a Wellington boot but has wool inserts and a sinchable cuff on top that can keep the snow out when necessary. They are a hardy choice to wear in the outdoors. I wear them year round from the summer to the winter. 

I had a good look at the two pairs of boots you see in the photos above before going out to buy a replacement pair this time around. What made one pair of boots fit to last decades and the other barely able to last a year?

Taking out my Vernier Callipers I soon found that the thickness of rubber in one boot was almost twice the thickness of the other. 

Both pairs at a quick glance look the same but one is made of much sturdier materials than the other. 

My newest pair of boots are made of rubber twice the thickness of my last pair. 

I'm hoping that they will give me the wear I would expect from a product that you would figure is being made to last!

-Martin

Digital mandalas and a trapper from Hay River

Buddhists will tell you life is impermanent.

In a nutshell..nothing lasts 

(image credit keri smith)

The Buddhist ceremony around the construction of  sand mandalas speaks to this point...

An elaborate and beautiful time consuming artistic construction is created only to be scattered to the wind...

I witnessed this ceremony once in northern India durning an event that lasted days. Slowly a massive artwork was created, by a goup of Tibetan Monks, only to be swept away once done!

Robert Frost the Famous American poet wrote...

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost

-

Yesterday I was not thinking about impermanence.

Mostly I was thinking about draining Coleman Lanterns for winter storage.

Later in the day I thought I would check in on a YouTube channel I follow...

Welcome To TheWildNorth 

The site is a collection of video logs created by a young trapper who lives off the land on his own near Hay River in the Canadian Yukon.

I have been meaning to share this site with my readers. 

The videos are honest, sometimes graphic depictions of life on the trapline and living in the woods.

I can speak for its truth because I have lived it myself.

Not only do I find the content interesting because of the unscripted reality but the way these videos are put together is fascinating to me in that nobody ever sent this fellow to journalism or film school...its apparent that he just figured it out on his own...

I don't know much about the sites creator Andrew so I thought I would do some research and see what I could find...

After a little looking around I found an interesting article that CBC radio did on him

The YouTube Trapper and The Idea of Digital Impermanence

You can link to it here

Aside from learning a bit more about Andrews background from listening to this podcast

it was interesting to hear that his intention behind making his videos is to pass on knowledge about what he does...about living off the land and some of his traditions...

Jason Scott, archivist, technology historian and filmmaker comments in the 

interview about Andrews intentions but also about the medium being used to archive it.

What came out surprised me! 

Worth a listen I encourage you to enjoy Andrews posts now in the present (as well as mine) because the future of our visual and verbal accounts remains uncertain...

Very much like a sand mandala.... Impermanent...

-Martin

A perfect moment in time

Life can be a challenge at times...

Making a living...fixing the house...relationships and more...

We all have personal strategies to deal with the stress of these challenges.

For me a warm cup of tea, or a walk in the woods can be a tonic to my soul...

Here are some photos of a perfect moment in time earlier this week...

A walk in the woods with my daughter and our dogs!

Joy and inner peace can often be found...unscripted...spontaneous and in the most simple acts

Like in an afternoon walk...

-Martin

The Bush Archeologist

There's lots to do in the bush before the snow falls...but today it was too windy so I found something else to do...

Todays project was an archaeological one...

I decided to excavate the remains of four beaver heads that I buried two years ago in the front garden.  I buried these skulls to let the bugs clean the flesh from their bones so I can prepare them for mounting.

Skulls have such an interesting aesthetic and these beaver heads were ones that I trapped giving them added meaning...

The first order of business was to actually find my buried beaver cache.

I remember having placed them under a rock...but there were a lot of rocks in the garden...

I was starting to feel a bit like a squirrel that misplaced their nuts 45 minutes into my dig when the shovel hit the edge of a skull.

With a little care most of the skulls, jawbones and teeth were located.

Not much to look at initially...

But a scrub in a pail of water and some tooth brushes did a nice job taking off the detritus.

Beautiful natural specimens...

evocative and talismanic

-Martin

Feeling Fall

Fall is here...

It's getting cold outside and the leaves on many of my trees have turned bright firey red and deep saturated yellow. Many of these leaves have started to fall, and are littering the forest floor.   My daily bush walks with the dogs now have an unreal feeling in this new colourful landscape.

As the days get shorter the light in the forest is changing too and suddenly there seems to be more noticable depth to the bush as I scan it.

Thoughts of hunting excite the blood,  triggered in part by these seasonal changes. 

People that have experienced the hunt will know what I mean...

The hunt can be many things...

Visceral, Vital...beautiful....

Here is an account of a hunting experience that may surprise some.

It did me!

-Martin

Still Here!

It's been a long time since I posted but I'm still here !

Why the silence?

I guess I have read a lot of blogs that post continually just for the sake of generating more content even if they are too busy to put some thought into their writing or just have nothing to say.

I have thought about this and would like to be as mindful and true as I possibly can to my readership.

-

....Yes I have been busy...

Whats been going on?

The pile of wood I have been working on that you have seen in past posts has gone from huge to something that you can see from space!

 Now most of the cut and split wood is stacked and seasoning.

There is still tons of wood to cut in the bush from trees that fell in the storm but finally I am starting to make some noticable headway on my clean up project and have made a few years worth of wood to burn as well.

Moose hunting has come and gone. 

My effort to shoot a moose with traditional archery equipment still continues...

There were two close calls with a moose this year within 30 yards of me in thick cover but no shot opportunities. 

I am still eager to take a moose with a wood bow...

A quote by Dr. Saxton Pope made in 1923 on the subject of fair chase encapsulates my feelings...

"The true hunter counts his achievement in proportion to the effort involved and the fairness of the sport"

And finally something I have not spoken much about so far in my blog...Trapping.

I have been reluctant in the past to post about trapping because of the great stigma that this heritage practice suffers from do to misunderstanding and prejudice.

I am a trapper and yes I have been out trapping.

Some friends called me after I got home from Moose hunting with a beaver problem that needed some attention.

It's been a full week of cuting trails, setting traps, and pelting beavers...

-

I see this blog as an ongoing doccumentary of my life...

Life is about the hunt in so many ways!

-Martin