Play Day in Kentucky

I am currently in Georgetown, Kentucky for some work-related clinical training.  Today I had a day off as all the slots available for trainees had been filled before I made the call to reserve my own.  I took advantage of the opportunity to do a bit of historically oriented exploration.

Several months ago I read on the Frontier Folk forum, a message board frequented by a wide range of historical reenactors, that the Fort Boonesborough Foundation, a group of people who volunteer their time to sustain, foster and promote quality programming at Fort Boonesborough State Park and Boone's Station Historic Site, was the proud recipient of the Frant T. Barnes collection of iron work dating from 1680 to 1860.  I really wanted to see that collection, so spent all morning at Boone's Station, not only checking out the iron work, but also the entire reproduction of the frontier community originally established by Daniel Boone in 1775.

 I got an early start, so hide to wipe heavy dew from the windshield and windows of my rented car.

My rental car (the one on the left)

I arrived very shortly after the gates to fort opened this morning, and having plenty of time decided to just circle the entire fort.  The weaver's cabin contained a couple of real gems, including an 18th century barn beam loom and the cutest little tape loom I think I've ever seen.

Barn beam wood, built primarily of chestnut wood in the 18th century, and still working today.

Tape loom, resting on the hand-hewn fireplace mantle of the weaver's cabin.

At first glance, I thought the tape loom to be a reproduction, but after speaking with the weaver and giving it a much closer inspection, it appears is actually an historical artifact that has been repaired here and there to keep it in service.  I took some addition close-up photographs in case I ever have the free time available to built one for my own use.

I shot a lot of photos of the iron work, mostly to detail items that I am certain (and can document) were also present in the Northwestern fur-trade which is my historical specialty.  One little item that particularly caught my eye was probably not terribly common on any frontier, but was nonetheless likely to seen among the possessions of a North West Company wintering partner or Hudson's Bay Company factor. 

Late 18th or early 18th century pocket corkscrew

 After spending all morning at Fort Boonesborough, my next thought was to check out the Shaker Harvest Festival at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill.  By Alaska standards it's a fairly short drive and I've been to the village before.  The displays of 18th century hand craftsmanship are truly mind boggling.  When I arrived and found not only the parking lots, but nearby fields as well, packed with rigs I decided I didn't want to deal with such crowds of people, so elected to visit the International Museum of the Horse instead.


The museum is located in Kentucky Horse Park, which is truly an astounding venue.  Horses are to Kentuckians what sled dogs are to Alaska, and they've pulled out all the stops when it comes to creating a venue dedicated to horses.  With over 1200 acres to work with, the park has something to offer everyone.  I've been there before, but today I was interested primarily in touring the museum again, looking for a specific bit of hardware I'd like to be able to document as available during the late 18th century.  If I can document it's availability I can justify using it while reproducing historical harnesses for my own teams. 

The thing is, I may go into a museum looking for something specific, but I can't come out of one without looking over everything.  I found what I needed, and much more.  It was well worth the time spent.

It was truly a lovely day down here in history's "Dark and Bloody Ground."  I couldn't have asked for nicer weather.  Everyone I met was personable and informative, and it was just a fun day off all the way around.


 

Autumnal Equinox and the devil's workshop

According to the desktop calendar today is the first day of autumn.  The calendar on the wall simply reads “Autumn begins.”  Neither is truly accurate.  Depending upon how one marks the beginning of the transitional season, autumn began up here three weeks to a month ago with the onset of a typically cool and rainy weather pattern.  Here in the Interior that rain has already changed to snow and though the ground is yet too warm for that snow to stick more than a few hours, snow is nonetheless more indicative of winter than of autumn.  On the 16th I shot a nice photograph here at work depicting the golden foliage of autumn.

 The very next day I captured an image of the season's first snow-fall.

No, today is not the first day of autumn, but it is the autumnal equinox.  Today the plane of the axis of the earth is parallel to that of the axis of the sun, giving both the northern and summer hemispheres approximately equal amounts of darkness and daylight.  No matter how I define it, there is no question that summer is gone and today’s constant snowfall is proof enough that sure enough winter is well on its way. 

Snow falling earlier today.

  It was certainly an interesting and challenging summer for this old-school Alaskan. First, it was late in coming.   Usually the trails are bare of snow by the middle of April but this year I was running dogs on a sled in early May and the ice didn’t break up on the Tanana River until the 20th of that month.  June was hectic as I tried to catch up on long-delayed spring cleaning and tried to make the place reasonably presentable for Trish and my June 15th wedding.  Our honeymoon was short-lived as two days later the Kanuti wild-fire burned less than 2 miles southeast of our place, resulting in our front yard serving as a refugee camp for displaced sled dogs.  That excitement was no sooner calmed than I had to return to work.

My R&R in July was completely dominated by the Stuart Creek 2 wildfire that threatened our little community and forced us to evacuate the property for a couple of days.  In August I tried to catch up on some of the summer projects that had been postponed, but with the onset of rainy weather limited the work I could perform outside.  I was able to get a henhouse together and put a pitched roof over the dog food shed.  The highest priority project, the importance of which was punctuated by July's fire, was mounting dog boxes on the trailer to increase our dog transportation capacity.  The paint on the boxes wasn't fully dried before I had to return to my workplace.

 Things here at work have been equally as hectic as affairs at home.  Summer is a busy season in Alaska’s oil patch and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and that makes it particularly hectic at my own workplace.  I can't recall a time when it's ever been so difficult to keep up with the pace of my job.

Even with all of August's activities I still don't feel as well prepared for winter as usual.   The unusually hot and dry summer resulted in local crop failures.  Shortages of hay have been noted by horse and livestock owners throughout the valley and straw for bedding dogs is also hard to acquire.  We usually go through 1 bale of straw per dog through the course of typical winter.  We currently have about half that amount stored in our shed and I may have to purchase imported straw at greatly inflated prices just to get us through this coming season.   Though wood chips can be substituted, straw provides considerably better insulation against the cold.

This coming R&R I will need to spend a week doing a work-related clinical rotation with Georgetown Scott County EMS in Kentucky.  According to their weather forecast I’ll be enjoying summer-like daytime temperatures well up into the 70s.  As cool and wet as the weather has been here at home I think I’m going to really enjoy that.  During my October R&R I’ll be spending several days in Anchorage for our annual medical refresher training, including a pediatric advanced life support refresher course.  In between those things, I need to find and purchase straw, clean up the yard and prepare it for freeze-up, do some significant repair work on our snow-machine, service both vehicles for the upcoming winter and more.  I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to get it all done or not, especially since we are also falling behind in early season training. 


Ready or not, the autumnal equinox is a marking point in the flow of time, and the passage of time waits for no person.  A summer such as the one so recently past reminds us that we can’t always control the circumstances of our lives, and when those circumstances tumble out of control all one can do is shrug, make a few jokes and then just go with the flow.  If idle hands are indeed the devil's work-shop he'll find little to work with around our place.

Project finished - at least for now.

We got a brief respite in the weather yesterday.  Though overcast and cool, the rain held off long enough to paint the new dog boxes and mount them permanently on the trailer.  This gives us 16 compartments, each large enough to comfortably contain a large dog, and some large enough to manage a pair.  Should we face another wicked bad fire season, or any other disaster that forces us off the property, we can transport all of the dogs in a single trip, and house them right on the rigs.

 

 

Projects Continue

As always during R&R, I've been keeping myself plenty busy with projects.  In addition to working on the dog trailer, I've also been helping Trish prepare her home to rent out.  That's primarily been a job of moving boxes, moving a bit of furniture, doing a few minor repairs and doing a LOT of cleaning.  We are finally at a point where we can advertise it, though.

Meanwhile, weather permitting, I've also been working on the new dog trailer, and I've made good progress.  What started out as a terribly dilapidated dog box set up for a pickup truck has been transformed into a pair of boxes, each with four large compartments, mounted on the trailer and now ready for a couple of coats of paint.

The original dog box was designed with 10 compartments, but since it was intended for a truck with only an 8-foot bed, they were tiny, especially in relation to our larger dogs.  By removing 1 partition in each, and shifting the others, I was able to create enough space to more comfortably accommodate our Stardancers.

To accomplish that, new doors had to be installed.  That was one of the more challenging aspects of the project, but my friend Mike Green explained how to do it in a way that saves expensive materials and results in a more tightly fitting door. 

First, make a template of the door to use as a pattern.  After carefully measuring twice, set the template over the space you want the door and trace around it.

Door template

Next, use a circular saw to carefully start the straight cuts on the edges of the doors and vent (window).

Using circular saw to start straight cuts.  Be VERY careful when manipulating the guard.

When all of the straight cuts have been made, mount the hinges and latches across those cuts.  Leave the corners intact until after the hardware has been mounted.

Mounting hinges and latches before cutting out the doors

Using a jig saw, cut out the corners of the vent first (let that just fall into the box) and then the door.

Cutting the corners

There you have, a perfectly fit and well hung door for each compartment.  Once all the corners are cut out, it's easy to just open the door and mount the grates for the vents on the inside.

The way I've designed this trailer, the faces of the boxes are mounted on shelves welded to the top rail of the trail and extending out over the fenders.  This leaves about 2/3 of the boxes extending over the space on the interior of the trailer.  That's a lot of weight for just a few carriage bolts to handle, so I needed to instal pedestals to support that weight.  I didn't want to fill in that space entirely, as it makes a handy area to stuff smaller pieces of camping gear and supplies.  Here is how I did that.

Leaving an opening along the top of the supporting pedestals creates space to carry small stuff.

When transporting sleds on top of the boxes, the runners of the sleds fit between a pair of parallel rails to prevent it from sliding around from side to side.  That makes it a lot easier to secure the sled for transport.  To do the job, I just removed the tops of the boxes, measured carefully twice, and clamped the 2 X 2 rails into place.  Then I flipped the top over, screwed them down, and reinstalled the tops.

The dog box on my truck uses hinged "foot boards" that flip up as a back-up to the door latches.  If a latch vibrates open on the road, the foot board prevents the door from opening and the loss of a dog while traveling at high speed down the road. 

The problem with foot boards is that the weight of the board stresses the hinges.  On the truck the solution was to use blocks of wood as supports, which also creates a handy ledge on which I can mount the end of the ramp I use to load our heavy dogs rather than lifting them by hand.  Since the trailer sits lower to the ground than the truck, it is easier to just train the dogs to jump straight into the boxes rather than using the ramp. 

So, to have the safety of a full-length door lock while reducing the stress on the hinges, I installed "drop boards" of 1 X 4s.  They are hinged at the top of the box where they don't have to take any stress.  In use, they just drop down across the tops of the doors to hold them in place.

Sled rails and drop boards in place.

Now all that remains is to pain the boxes and mount them permanently in place.  The resulting trailer can easily confine and transport at least 8 of our dogs, and more if we double up in a few compartments.  We can carry a sled on top of the boxes on each side, and a third right down the middle aisle, though it's more likely that space will be used to transport equipment and camping gear. 

There are likely to be some more improvements made to the trailer over time.  I'm thinking of adding an additional, separate dog box on each side as there is enough space at the rear end of the trailer to do so.  Another option is to just build a storage boxes for gear in those spaces.  For now the immediate goal of having enough capacity to transport every dog in the kennel in a single trip is accomplished.  Once I have the things painted I'll post some more pictures.