Still Working on Winter Wood, Day 2

Well, today has been a day of serious physical labor, if I do say so myself...my muscles are aching, and though in a good way, they still ache...and I don't mean a little.  To compound the physical efforts of the day, we are having an unusual heat wave (up here at the cabin we reached 93, that is really hot for here) and this evening in particular feels hot.  But while I say that, I have to be grateful for the lesser humidity compared to our river home, because there the heat + humidity would be unbearable, although you are inside with strong AC (none here)...geesh, am I complaining???  I dare not, because Mountain Man suggested we head down to the creek before bed and soak our tired feet in our lovely creek (always 60 degree water from a spring)...I think that is a lovely idea...hmmm, maybe I'll bring some up in a bowl to put next to my bed for my hot flashes...

On to the events of the day...beginning with the end result, this is what we accomplished today...notice the big stack of wood next to the outhouse and the remaining split wood next to the splitter that we still need to find a place to stack...

After visiting the garden (morning routine), we got to work.  The photo below is early this morning.  Our first steps...Johny had to replace some rotten wood on the outhouse before we could begin the splitting & stacking wood process, and I had to prepare the ground for the pallet we would be stacking on.  Then we began splitting.

It didn't take long and we were stacking!

This is the splitter working, an amazing machine and very grateful to get to use it!

I'll have you know that today Mountain Man was much more comfortable & knowledgeable of the process and not longer stood behind the wheel, LOL!

I decided that it would be a great idea to burn all the bark we were getting off the logs.  We have a small fire pit right near where we were splitting, so it seemed logical.  Of course, I did not begin this burning until early afternoon, the warmest part of the day, so the heat from the burning remnants did not help with the heat.  But I was happy with how clean things were when we were done, ha ha! And note the water in the background...safety first!

After splitting most of the logs, we had to put a log next to the stack in order to be able to reach the top and stack some more logs! We finally reached the point that we could stack no more!  Though there is some wood that is touching the outhouse, that is due to settling; we did stack the wood with space in between.

But we had to finish the job!  And since we were returning the splitter to Charlie tomorrow morning, we decided to put all our dwindling energy into continuing to split until every log was gone (of those we had selected...there are still about 75 more logs behind the outhouse to go), and just throw them in a pile, organize tomorrow (from previous posts, you may presume this was not my favorite thing to do, but I was so tired, I just wanted to be done!).

The very last log, which was the largest, was 21" in diameter, 66 1/2" in circumference...so heavy! We were so tired we did not want to risk trying to lift it, so Mountain Man used his manual tools to make an initial split...and then we could lift it to the splitter.

If we had to cut each and every one of these logs this way, we would never make any headway!  While we are working on living off the land, I sure am glad there are some tools like wood splitters to help along the way!

I'm off to the creek, my feet will thank me!

Thanks for reading my blog, you are the best f/f/r/s/f's, see you tomorrow,
Lise