10/24-26/17 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

The drive over was spectacularly beautiful. The leaves were at their peak and had been freshened up by all the rain last week. On top of that, the sun was shining and there was fresh snow above 3000 feet. It was just gorgeous. I arrived at 12:15. The temperature was 37° and there was about 2 inches of snow on the ground. I used 4wd to get in and park. The snow berms under the eaves were pretty big so it looked like about a foot of snow had fallen earlier but that it had melted and shrunk down to about 2 inches in the open.

When I brought my gear up, I was happy to see again that there were no signs of mice. Maybe the baseboards I have installed have sealed them off. The pressure of getting those baseboards installed has slacked off a little. That together with the promise of a beautiful dry week and the fact that I am almost out of firewood and have none laid up for the winter, prompted me to decide to spend this entire trip harvesting firewood. I will devote every nice day from now on until the snow gets deep to gathering firewood.

After lighting a fire in the stove, hoisting the flag, and having my lunch and a nap, I got the chainsaw out and decided to see whether or not the repair job I had done on the exhaust manifold was going to hold. After gassing and oiling up the saw and filing the chain, I tried it and it started and ran perfectly except for the starter cord. I have been having a problem with that cord for a while now and it is a complete mystery to me.

After pulling the cord a few times, it sometimes fails to retract all the way. As a result, the amount hanging out gets longer and longer. I can't run it that way, so what I do is take the starter rope mechanism off and then wrap two or three or more turns of the rope around the pulley. I wrap enough of them around to begin compressing the spring a little. Then I put it back together and it works fine for a while before the rope starts coming out again. So I repeat the process.

This time, I paid particular attention to the mechanism to see why the rope fails to wind back up. My conclusion is that it is impossible, but I know I am wrong about that. It definitely happens.

One explanation is that the rope stretches. But I have done this so many times that if the rope was stretching, it would be as thin as a piece of string by now. It is just as thick as it has always been.

Another possibility is that the rope is hopping off the pulley. That seems to be what is happening because the rope lengthens by one circumference of the pulley at a time. But in looking at the mechanism, I don't see how the rope could hop off the pulley without getting wound around the axle that it turns. It just seems impossible. I am going to have to ask Robert about it next time I see him.

I took the saw and the wheelbarrow down to the hairpin turn to buck up and harvest a couple of logs that were by the rhubarb patch. I also decided to work on cutting away the big stump that is near the upper start of the hairpin turn and which was in the way when I tried to drive the truck around the turn. The bar on my chainsaw is only 20 inches and the base of the stump is more like 40 inches so I wasn't able to cut all the way through.

I made a 20-inch kerf on the low side and then decided to cut the stump in half. Since I could cut from any direction halfway up the stump, I was able to cut the top foot of the stump away. Then I made a vertical cut down to the kerf below. At least that gave me about a foot more clearance for the tire and for the bumper.

Before I went in for the night, I hauled about half of the rounds I had cut, except for those from the stump, up and stacked them in front of the cabin. I was really tired when I went in.

On Wednesday, the temperature outside was 26° when I got up. After breakfast, I hauled the rest of the rounds, again except for those from the stump, up to the cabin and added them to the stack.

Then I decided to harvest the wood from the big fir the loggers had felled for me down the slope from the privy. I had already harvested all of the top of it down to the edge of the cliff. Now there was 24 feet of butt log lying down the hill with the top of it resting right on the rock ledge. The question was how to get the log up on top.

My plan was to use a come-along and winch parts of it up over the crest of the cliff. I needed to buck the log into a few pieces. The log was in contact with the ground only at the top and at the butt, so I knew that when I bucked it, it would be a problem to keep it from binding and trapping the saw bar.

I started by marking the log at firewood-length intervals where I would eventually cut the rounds. Those marks gave me candidate places for making the initial cut. I decided to cut it in the middle and I started with a plunge cut right through the center of the log. Then, I cut straight down all the way through. If the log sagged in the process, the kerf would open instead of close and my saw wouldn't get trapped.

After making that cut, I used the top of the bar to cut up a ways. Then I made a couple parallel cuts down from the top and removed about an inch or two between them as I went. The idea was to make a large enough kerf so that the bar wouldn't get stuck. I was very careful and I jammed a thick stick in the kerf after it was cut in a ways. I also hammered wedges into the kerf to keep it open.

It worked. I made the cut and got my saw out. The log then sagged down to the ground with the top 12 feet bearing tightly on the bottom log.

Then I did the same kind of cut two firewood-lengths above that cut which resulted in the log being cut into three pieces. The plan was now to see if I could pull that top 10-foot piece up over the cliff or whether I would need to cut it smaller.

I went in for lunch and a nap thinking over my next move. When I went back out, I brought a thick nylon rope, a bunch of chains, a cant hook, and a come-along. I anchored the rope to a chain choker around a stump behind the privy and rigged the come-along between the rope and a chain choker around the top of the 10-foot log. The reason for the rope was that I figured that I wanted to use the stretch in the rope so that the tension would be maintained while I rocked the log with the cant hook to get it to go past obstructions.

After rigging it all up and trying it, I realized that there was too much stretch in the rope and it would be too dangerous to stretch it much more. I decided to take the rope out and rig it using chains only. They don't stretch at all.

It worked much better, but I was only able to take up one or two clicks before I needed to rock the log with the cant hook. Each time, the log would advance only about an inch. But after a dozen or so times, I had pulled it up a foot.

When the big tree fell, it had bent a 5-foot cedar sapling over and had it pinned under a big vine maple. I wanted to make sure I didn't injure the cedar with my work but it was right in line with where I needed to drag the log. So, it added some extra effort to make sure the log didn't hit the sapling.

Once the top of the log was up over the cliff edge, I could get three or four clicks before I would have to roll the log. Eventually, I used up all the cable in the come-along and had to re-rig. To keep the log from falling back down the cliff, I connected a chain from the choker to the chain above the come-along. Then, when I relaxed the come-along, that chain took the load and let the log fall back only a few inches.

With the come-along free, I pulled out all its cable and hooked it back up. Then I was able to crank the log completely up above the cliff where I could buck it up. I bucked it into seven rounds. That finished me for the day. I was exhausted but happy with the results.

On Thursday morning, I used essentially the same rigging, except I had to substitute a much longer chain, to winch up the two-round segment that was still down the hill. This piece was smaller and lighter, but it was further down the hill and wanted to come up crosswise. It gave me the same sort of trouble at the edge of the cliff getting around the cedar sapling without injuring it. After another re-rigging maneuver, I got the log safely up on top of the cliff in a stable place where I can buck it in two.

Since time was running out, I didn't get the saw out but instead rolled the seven rounds down to the cabin and stacked them under the eaves. I'll go back for the rest later.

I had my lunch and left for home at about 1:15 very happy that my firewood stash is starting to grow. I'll have no problem getting enough for the winter.