We headed up last Friday to The Cabin. For those of you who don't know about our cabin, it's not the nice, well kept cabin on the lake that you're seeing in your mind. This is a four-walls-and-a-roof-no-glass-in-the-windows-walls-don't-really-reach-the-ceiling-in-some-places-home-to-packrats-more-of-the-year-than-people kinda cabin. But it's ours. Since the weekend was forecasted to have highs in the 100s we decided to buy dry ice to put in the food coolers so it wouldn't spoil in the heat. We headed up to Ellensburg where we stopped at the Fred Meyers to pick up the dry ice. Uncle Fred said that they'd have some and we'd called to check and they said they carried it. They didn't say that anyone ever checked to see if they'd ordered any. When Mom went in and the lady took her to get it they unlocked the chest and it was empty. So then we drove over to Safeway, but they didn't carry any at all. Our last stop was at the Super 1 Foods and the third time was a charm! We put 5 pounds in the "refrigerator" cooler and 10 pounds in the "freezer" cooler. Then we headed out on the drive up to Wilbur to meet David and his fiancee Jennie. Last year as we climbed the hill on the other side of Vantage we had a tire start to fall apart. This year all went well with our tires but there was an accident on that same hill. It looked like a little red sports car clipped a white suburban and they did such an excellent job of it that the back axel on the sports car broke. The back passenger wheel was sitting at quite an angle. It hadn't happened long before we got there because there were people in the road stopping the traffic all the way across our side of the high way. There was only a semi-truck in front of us so we had front row seats to the action. Lots of guys from the semi-trucks and vehicles came forward and they pushed the sports car off the road. While they were doing that however, idiots started driving in the ditch up the side of the road to get around the traffic jam. A semi-truck a few cars behind us started to pull out too and Mom and I were like "Really?!" But he was just blocking the side of the road so those a**holes couldn't cause more of a jam than we already had. After the suburban got itself off the road too the traffic started moving again, but there was one car from the jerks-r-us train left on the side of the road and you better believe not one of us let them in. The rest of the drive was uneventful and we met up with David, Jennie and Tayla at Doxies in Wilbur. We had to eat outside because we brought the dogs with us and they couldn't be left for a moment in the truck. We made it to the cabin around 5 PM and it was really hot, probably around 100. The door had been left open and it was full of crap from packrats. There was probably a whole tree in there. David cleaned it out and Mom burned the debris in a small fire because we were afraid of any sparks getting caught up in the wind and it wasn't like we needed more heat! After getting the camp set up we ate our dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs and fell into our beds.
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| I couldn't stop taking pictures of the moon... |
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| Jennie, Mom, David and Tayla |
Saturday morning we got up and you could feel it was already getting hot. We ate our breakfast and then David and Jennie went up to get trees for cutting up to bring back for firewood this winter for us. Mom and Tayla went in to Colville to get wood for a deck that we had decided to build at the front of the cabin. I stayed and removed the old concrete blocks and tried to get the new blocks in place. When they got back, Tayla went up and helped her dad and Mom and I set to work building deck. First we put up a blue tarp and moved David's canopy over so the place was shaded. When we put up the tarp a whole bunch of wasps started swarming at the end of the cabin's roof. We sprayed them but there were a couple that still would come back and pester us but at least most of them were dead. Then we leveled the blocks and got the frame made. We had to move the blocks at this point because we didn't have them placed correctly. We were going to do two framing posts in the box of the deck, but we didn't have enough brackets to do that, so we only put one in. When we laid the boards across the top it seemed to give in places and was going to be too weak. So then we used the L brackets we had and put in two more posts, ending up with 3 instead of 2! Somewhere in the middle of doing this it felt like to me that all of a sudden the heat just really built in, like the temperature had risen quickly in just a few minutes. Mom had brought a thermometer with us to be able to see just how hot it got. It was around 2:30 PM and the thermometer said it was 103. By the time we were getting tired, Leslie and Justin had showed up and so they and Jennie helped put the screws in the top boards. Then we all brought chairs up and admired the new deck with some front porch sitting.
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| On the way to the creek we found some fauna... |
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| Justin showing us up at carpentry |
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| The high temp on Saturday |
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| I french braided their tails to try to keep them clean |
When we were doing the calculations the night before we thought we would need another step for getting into the cabin, but once it was all put together we didn't need a step at all! The deck was perfect. As a present to ourselves we set up the shower and each took one to cool ourselves down. It didn't take long to heat up the creek water to lukewarm for the showers. Dinner that night was spaghetti and it was delicious and well earned. Through dinner we started drinking and got Justin and a few others of us drunk and had a blast trying to teach Justin how to dance. We also roasted marshmallows and ate smores and had a rocking good time. Leslie and Justin stayed the night with us, so Mom and I slept on the queen bed together and gave Leslie the "matriarch" bed and set up another cot for Justin. When I got into bed and settled myself in, it sounded like something cracked under me. But when Mom got in and settled herself, there was a definite crack and things falling under the bed. We thought it was the plywood and just slept carefully that night. Both of us clung to the outside because we knew the framing boards were still good, but the mattress dipped in the center, which made that difficult. We both slept poorly that night because of the mattress and because it was so hot. I slept in a tank top and shorts, mosquitos be damned.
Sunday morning most of us rose early as it was supposed to be even hotter. You could tell it was getting warmer earlier than the day before and Justin and David ran off to cut up the trees David had brought in. Mom and I wanted to go up to the beaver pond, so while Leslie and Tayla ran into town to get more ice we went off. The pond was REALLY low! It looked like the beaver were gone and you could hear a lot of water going over the falls. The dam looked pretty much intact and we couldn't see where the water was going through. I took pictures and we walked a bit around the perimeter and then headed back. It was getting hot.
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| The beaver lodge almost out of the water |
Next we climbed up Mom's mountain to the circle of rocks and I read the readings for Sunday. A little church in the mountains. Then we headed back to the camp. We were really sweating and the temp was at 99.
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| Justin and David cutting wood |
We sat on the deck and placed wet rags on ourselves to cool off. The heat was rising and we kept drinking water and wetting rags. I'd brought two little fans and a solar powered battery, but eventually we turned them off because they were just blowing hot air. I would take my rag and wet it in the ice water in the cooler and then put it on the back of my neck. We were just completely soaked. Your entire body was sweating and you couldn't do anything but sit there. Eventually everything just looked hot, it was like the whole world was tinged with yellow. The temp got up to 114 that day. We talked and read some magazines but couldn't do much in that heat. That afternoon we lifted up my mattress and found that there wasn't any plywood under the springs, just some framing in the middle which had broken. So Justin and I cut a new piece of 2X4 for the center frame and created a post out of the broken piece to strengthen the frame.
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| The high temp on Sunday |
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| He ripped off the sleeves of the shirt and made a headband...and he's burping. |
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| Innehecute?! |
Leslie and Justin were going to leave that day, so after help fixing the bed they took off and Tayla went with them. She was not doing well in the heat and really needed to go back to some air conditioning. But not 10 minutes later they were back because Justin felt really bad about leaving his dad to load all that wood. So we made hamburger stew for dinner as the temperature started dropping. After dinner Leslie, Justin and Tayla took off again and the rest of us made smores and I worked a little at my wood carving. It started getting really dark so we headed to bed and another hot night, sleeping with all the windows in the cabin open. During the night or early Monday morning it rained a little and you could really feel the temperature drop, thank goodness.
Monday morning we got up and it was cloudy and a really nice temp. We ate breakfast and David wanted to take Jennie up to the Madonna tree. Mom and I hadn't made it up there the day before so we went and saw both that and Grammy's tree.
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| We eat well at the cabin |
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| The Madonna Tree |
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| Tallest tree in the forest folks |
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| Grammy's tree |
Then I had wanted to scout out this path I'd seen in the meadow near the cabin to see if it went around the other side of the beaver pond. I'm looking for a new place to possibly build a new cabin in the far future. It did come out on the other side of the pond and David and Jennie were on the dam, seeing where the water was going through. There was a big hole under the dam where it looks like a big rain storm washed it away. Because the water was so low you could see an old sluice on the other side of the waterfall and some manmade piece of what was an old dam. We worked at putting some branches in the hole so that other debris would start blocking it up again.
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| Pieces of a manmade dam |
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| See the old sluice? |
Mom and I found a pretty nice flat place above the pond that could be a good spot for a new cabin. There isn't a creek, but it wouldn't be too far down to dig a well. As Mom and I headed back to the cabin and David and Jennie went up to the mill building and the other cabins. Then it was time to pack it up. We got it all broken down and headed out around 2:30. I wanted to stop and pick up some slate on the side of the road that I'd seen on the way up, so Mom and I stopped while David and Jennie headed on to Sandy's Drive-In, where we were meeting for lunch. While I was looking through the rocks a truck with a single light on the top turned towards where Mom was parked on the side of the road, took the road behind her, paused and they were sort of watching me, then turned around and took off really fast. I thought, "Great I'm going to be arrested for picking up rocks on the side of the road," and so I grabbed the few I'd picked and put them in the truck including a really heavy large one that would have made my Grammy proud. Then we took off back on the road to Sandy's. I saw a couple more cars pass us heading the other way and thought maybe they were going to turn around and ask me to give up the rocks. But I managed to avoid the coppas this time! We ate lunch and then all took off our separate ways. Mom drove back down to Wilbur and then we switched drivers and I drove home. Around Almira you could see this hanging smoke cloud extending out over the wheat fields. In the far distance there were giant smoke columns and as we drove out of Ephrata to I-90 you could really see how big the fire was. We found out the next day that was the Sleepy Hollow fire near Wenatchee. We could see the smoke cloud and columns more than 100 miles away. And now we are set to break a record number of days with highs at or above 100 degrees. The old record was 7 and we met that today with the forecast looking like we could have up to 5 days or more of 100 degree weather. What a sticky way to start summer...
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| Teepees on Soap Lake on the way home |
