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beaver in the winter lake
Saturday, November 30 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning I got the fire going good and ate a bagel that had been languishing in a paper bag on the kitchen counter since last weekend. It was possible to soften it up using the microwave oven, and then it toasted okay. It was still pretty tough to chew, but I wasn't fussy.
The plan today was to finish dragging the floating dock fully out of Woodworth Lake. I expected to use that second pulley up in a hemlock to help, but when I looked through my wire rope hardware, I saw that I didn't have any more wire clips, which I was going to need to get that second wire rope working again. So I decided to drive out to civilization. After trudging out to the Forester, I found that a RockStar energy drink I'd bought at a gas station north of Schoharie was still about half full, and the contents were now a slushy slurry. The smell, which I would say resembled that of a cheap cigar, was overpowering. But I drank it anyway.
I ended up at the Ace Noble Hardware in Johnstown, as I hadn't been impressed with the wire clip selection at the Gloversville TrueValue hardware. As I walked into the Ace, a half dozen young boys were collecting money for something. I looked like a crazy mountain man with my week of beard growth, eyeglasses tinted black from the glare of the snow, and my hoodie concealing most of my head, and I think the kids were scared of me because they didn't say anything even when I looked them in the eye. So as I came back out, I asked in quiet voice what they were collecting money for. One of them said something which I didn't parse, but I had a dollar in my hand to give him anyway. It was a miserable day to be standing out in the cold.
When I eventually got up the motivation to trudge down to the dock, I brought a beer, some wire rope supplies, and the big manual winch (because I'd left the small one back in Hurley). I also brought a snow shovel, as I thought it would be easier to work if things weren't disappearing into snow. It was a good thing I had it, though not for the expected reason. I didn't really need to clear snow from where I was doing the winching, especially since I never even bothered to operationalize that second pulley. I found that with all the snow on the dock it was extremely hard to winch. But once I'd shoveled that snow off, making it hundreds of pounds lighter, winching was much easier. As I worked, I wrapped some extra cable around the part of the winched cable nearest me so that if anything broke, that extra cable would absorb most of the released energy. With that system to comfort me, I could dedicate myself better to what I was doing. Before too long, I had the floating dock completely out of the water. And that water was high too; it had come up several inches since last weekend and was now about as high as it ever gets. (I'd been concerned that the lake might already be frozen, but the main part of it was still almost entirely open.)
I should mention that while I'd been setting up to do the winching, I'd felt something sharp occasionally poking me in the right side an inch or two above my hip. When I investigated this, I found a porcupine quill was coming through the material of the hoodie that I wear as a winter coat. I don't know how it had ended up there, but but it must've come out of one of our dogs last weekend.
When I was all done, I cracked open that beer and prepared to walk back to the cabin. I wanted to carry out that big marine battery I'd been keeping at the dock since last November, since I was now sure I would be doing all my dock winching using human power alone. But it was so heavy that carrying it through the snow was going to be a real bitch. I needed to carry it back to the cabin the same way I'd carried it from the cabin: using my firewood-hauling backpack. So I returned to the cabin, warmed myself up, fed the fire, dried out some more snowed-on wood from the woodpile (the indoor woodpile has been depleted), and ate some food. Then I went returned the dock with the firewood backpack, though I took a circuitous route to get there, taking the path down through the cliffs to the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek just below the lake and then along the shoreline to the dock. In all this trudging through the snow, the only tracks I've come across look to have been left by some sort of rabbit. While I was briefly at the dock this second time, a large beaver swimming not far away kept splashing the surface with her tail. I'm familiar with them doing that in the summer, perhaps to scare people away from their lodges. But apparently they will do it any time of year.
Back at the cabin, I eventually went down to the basement and put in the effort to install an XY-3606 power converter to supply five volts to the SolArk Co-pilot from the twelve volts of starter power coming from the Generac generator, the same battery-backed power source used to power the east basement remote controller. An XY-3606 is functionally similar to a cigarette lighter USB power adapter, but it's supposedly highly efficient, which cheap USB adapters are unlikely to be. Unfortunately the XY-3606 doesn't include any mounting holes, so I had to improvise with the modified plastic parts from ethernet cable clips. Once I had it set up, the SolArk Co-pilot no longer depended on household power to operate.
I ended the evening mostly just drinking booze and watching more episodes of Alone. I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of psedoephedrine late this morning, so it was a little difficult to come down from that, especially since I couldn't take diphenhydramine (which I'd now had for two or three days in a row, so it would be ineffective). But I was careful not to drink too much.
The cabin today. With that amount of snow on the solar panels, I never generated more than about 30 watts of power from the mostly-overcast sky.
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The path from the cabin to the outflow part of the lake passes some cliffs that look lovely in snow.
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The Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek just below the lake, well before it bifurcates. We're looking northeast.
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The Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek just below the lake. We're looking southeast.
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The Woodworth Lake Outflow Bay is mostly frozen now.
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The part of our dock that stays in the lake. Note that the main body of the lake is not yet frozen.
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The floating part of the dock after I'd finished winching it onto the shore.
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The beaver I saw today swimming back and forth in the lake. (My only camera was my cheap phone.)
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