Winter Trip to Our Alaskan Off Grid Cabin (Part 1)

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are in the world. Today we are all on a frozen river in Alaska. We are headed to our cabin. I think we're about a third of the way there and it's going to be a long journey today. Probably close to five hours because we are going super slow for the dogs. Pulled over and we're going to have some snacks. We brought along all kinds of snacks but we're going to dive into some banana muffins that Ariel made the other day. She froze a bunch of these so we got a bunch of these ready for the trip and we've got a bunch of snacks. We brought some good food this time around. Where we're at right now is a point that we always like to kind of stop. It's where two rivers join so we were just on one river. Now we're on the next river. Like Ariel said, we're about a third of the way there. I think we've been about maybe 17 miles or so. We're letting the dogs out. They're taking a break. Come here, Bo. They're doing good. Hey dude, you want a muffin? Too bad. Let's head over to the dog sled and I want to show you guys a few modifications we made to it. Along with the heavy duty bumper that we already put on and the hitch, I ended up taking out our bolts on the actual hitch and on the chain and I replaced those all with grade 8 bolts so we have the strongest bolts we can get in there and then my neighbor was also nice enough to let me use his welder so I welded the hitch and the safety chain onto the trailer. Pretty solid now. We stuck a bicycle inner tube around the safety chain so it doesn't scratch up our bumper and you might notice that the dogs have a new windshield. It looks similar to the last one but it's not. It was more expensive and it's a lot stronger. This is Lexan. I believe that's how you say it and we went to the local kind of plastic shop that specializes in plastic and fiberglass and he hooked us up with this awesome piece of windshield for the dogs and he assured us that this thing will not break even in the cold temperatures. One last thing is we took off the old tie downs and we replaced all of them with these nice heavy duty ones. I think these are a 1,000 pound tie down so hey should be good to go. So far we've just been stopping every few miles eating some snacks. It's a really nice day out here. It's probably about 10 degrees right now and I think the high is going to get close to 30 so we're kind of lightly dressed and we're having a great ride on the river so far. Good muffin? We also made a few quiches for the trip. They're like mini cupcake quiches. They're really good and today we've actually been seeing the Iditarod teams go by. The mushers and their dogs. We've seen three so far. I think the person who won actually finished last night. I could be wrong. We weren't planning to to run into them today because we were actually planning to get out on the river yesterday but we ended up being out here today a day late and it's really awesome to see them again. Look how mean Bo is. Well that just about does it for our little break. We've got a little over 40 miles to go. We're gonna head down the river. Can you get in there? Get up there. Hey you jumped last night. Get in there. Come on Bo. That was a lot of powder. There's like you see all the overflow and stuff? The old overflow yeah. Old overflow. Look how nice this trail is. We made it! Five hours later we made it. Oh my gosh. It's crazy. I didn't think we'd ever get here. Ben come. Trip went well. Everyone's alive. The dogs made it in good shape. Very excited we made it out here one last time. What are you doing pup? Oh you having fun? Bo you made it again dude. That is good fishing. We're gonna head up and start a fire. It's not actually that cold right now and try to get Eric's machine up there again. That worked really well last time. Bo come on. Some sheets up there. He's having a hard time getting up the hill. Maybe we need to help him. He's tired. Good job Bo. Do you need water? Stay Bo. Stay here. Come on Ben. You want to go outside with us? Well the deck was clean last time we came here. A little over foot. A lot of fresh snow out here. Come across that lake we had some deep powder so and then our whole walkway needs to be packed down again. I'm sure we'll get our snowshoes on. Pack it down so we can walk around while we're here. I'm gonna go down and get some more stuff for the sled and get some water for the dogs. Bennett go on. Go with daddy. Go. Go have fun. He likes going. It did work really well. That was really fun. I think that's my new preferred method. I'm taking my lunch break. This ain't no union. Get to work. Look I'm still working. Oh my gosh. I was gonna help. I was gonna maybe try to like drag it What do you do for fun? Work. Oh just work. Abuse my body. I really was slipping right there. It gets steeper as it goes up higher. Yeah I know. Getting the house warmed up. Starting to feel pretty good in here. I'm pretty sure it's about freezing now. It's pretty late in the day actually. I think it's like 4 30 in the afternoon. It took us a while to get here. The sun this time of year does not go down until a little after eight o'clock. So we still got a bunch of time this evening to do whatever we want. We brought fishing stuff. We brought a couple tip ups and the ice auger so we might do some pike fishing. We brought pretty much the normal stuff we bring but one thing kind of cool that we brought was the cast iron skillet that we found out here. This is the grizz wolf. She's looking good and ready to cook some good food for us while we're here. When we bought the cabin we realized that it came with a ton of this fuel. Little camping fuel. We got four gallons here unopened so we were like we need to get something to use that. So we bought a really cool lantern. We have not used it and we left it in the packaging. We figured the padding would be good for the trip up here and this is a Dietz. It's their model 80 and this is one of their bigger lanterns so it should be pretty cool to have this thing out here. There are a lot of different lanterns you can get. We tried to just find one that would fit our needs. So that's her. We got a nice black one. It's a beautiful lantern. We'll get this thing filled up with fuel test it out a little bit later. What we were using up here we're just using flashlights. We have our little o-lights with the lantern attachment and then we have a Coleman propane lantern. We brought a couple more jugs of propane for that thing. The propane lanterns are really nice because they're super bright but they go through the propane really fast and since we had that fuel we wanted to use that and then we got one other thing we brought up. Ariel found these really cool slow burning paraffin wax candles. So we got three of these and then the cabin came with one. So we're gonna be lit up in this little cabin. Also brought our little mini camping stove kit and we brought a lot of food and we're gonna eat because we're really hungry after that long ride in. He buried himself in there. Did you see him? You okay? Does he smell food or something? He's in a cocoon now. He's good. Yes. Oh my gosh. I feel great. I feel great enough to do some things like fishing. You know what I mean? Especially because we don't have a big manual haul. Oh my gosh. I'm actually interested to see how thick the ice is and how cold the ice is and what it looks like. It's going to be a little bit of an overflow though because it's snow so deep. Out there we'd have to bring a shovel. Yeah we have a shovel. I think we averaged closer to 10. Not quite 10. Like probably like 11 miles an hour. Probably yeah. 12. So the mushrooms would have passed us. One guy was like how many teams have you passed so far? No way. What did you tell us? Like how many teams have gone by you? I was like four. He's like all right. I need to know where I am in the race. What mountain is that you know? It must be Mount Susanna. Now that Eric and I have eaten lunch we thought it'd be really fun to show you guys all the food we bring. Kind of how we pack it. This is our third time out here successfully with the dogs and we just kind of learned some things. It's not the easiest ride in. There are a lot of bumps especially this late season. I mean you literally go over thousands and thousands of bumps. First off we have two ways that we separate our food. One's for stuff that can get frozen so because it's so cold sometimes when we come if it's like negative 10 the things that you have exposed to that temperature are obviously going to freeze and then we have a pack back here that Eric keeps little warmers in and that way the food in there doesn't freeze. This is the one that can freeze and we put a lot of stuff in here. As you know we're big on trying to you know hunt, harvest, produce a lot of our own food but obviously we do not produce all of our own food and for trips out here it is a little inconvenient to bring our own stuff and not just because getting out here is tricky but also you know making it out here too and then cleaning it. We also don't want bears to smell all the food when it comes to springtime. This is eggs. We decided to bring eggs all pre-scrambled so they're ready to go for breakfast. Other jarred items we brought is a cornbread. I actually made this. It's cornbread mix that I made at the house. I've got some coconut oil in there. We're gonna be making some cornbread. Got our BBQ sauce, cream for coffee, salsa and some cowboy candy. As far as dry goods we also try not to leave any of that stuff really out here. We have like some backup beans and rice but bears can smell pretty much anything so you don't want to we don't want to leave that kind of stuff out here. Eric brought some rice, herbs, we've got a whole bunch of spices in here. I've got a little dessert plan. We've got some hot chocolate too. A little while back a subscriber was nice enough to gift us a whole bunch of these mountain houses so we have these and I will say this has been so convenient and just simple because you have to bring a lot of food out here especially when it's cold and you're burning a lot of calories and sometimes we'll bring all this food and it's still not enough you know we'll run short so these are awesome. Of course we had to bring the Timmies. We got some Tim Hortons for Eric and some coconut milk and a little condensed milk for our dessert. We've got Ritz crackers back here we picked these up for the salmon salad just easy convenient everything that we bring out here I mean there's like a thought process behind it because is it something that's light that's going to get smashed like this? Is it something that has plastic in it that you're going to need to bring back with you? So we have to think about those types of things. We also have potatoes, garlic for breakfast. Over here in the windowsill I have some milk. We brought milk in these jars and we wrap these jars with towels and rags and then we have to wrap them again on the way back. They're pretty durable but we've got to be careful with them. Other things we brought are these are banana nut chocolate chip muffins I made and froze. They're awesome out here really quick you know snack bite size things and then we also have little powerball things that we made a while back. These quiche cupcakes and this kind of stuff's really good for us when we're out on the river we're hungry just bite size just pop in your mouth and get going. I'm not a big fan of plastic bags and ziplocs just because they're I like to reuse them I just don't like buying that kind of stuff. So it's kind of not my my preferred method to bring stuff out here in but it works really well compared to glass. And lastly we have a moose roast and some of our anaheim peppers. We're using this for breakfast and dinner. So that's a wrap for everything we brought. It's clearly a lot easier to bring packaged food or pre-made food because cooking out here isn't quite ideal and I'm sure we'll kind of figure out what works best for us over the years. I think we're gonna make some coffee and then head outside to see if we can punch some holes and catch some fish. Well I'm always one for having a cup of coffee but change of plans we're going fishing we're gonna have coffee when we get up here later. Is that what happened? Oh my gosh there we go Okay now we're ready to fish. So I think this is a good spot. Eric's gonna drill a hole and we are only targeting, well actually there's more than pike out here, but we are targeting pike. That was thick. Almost had to have an extension. Never had to drill through ice that thick. Pretty cool Got through. Maybe we should set this one and see how deep it is. We're using hot dogs again. We got one that broke in half so I'm gonna put half on because I want to check the depth of this water see where we're at. First hole at the new cabin. See if there's fish in this lake right? This is perfect. About six feet of water and there's four feet of ice three and a half feet of ice. This will be perfect. Should we go out further and drill a new hole? Do you want me to do that shovel thing that I did last time? Went through. Oh all right went through but barely. Yeah it's about seven feet. A little deeper. Perfect. We've never fished this lake. Don't really know what we're doing out of this one so we're just trying right in front of our cabin. I think if we don't catch any today we'll probably fish again tomorrow but here in Alaska you need to attend your tip-ups so luckily our cabin's right there. I'm gonna finish making our cup of coffee and we're gonna watch for our flags to go up. It'd be awesome to catch a pike out here. Well we came to the cabin to finish off our coffee and our water wasn't boiling yet on the stove so I figured I'd get out my little camp stove and unfortunately somewhere on the trip it kind of came undone. I don't think it broke I think it just came unscrewed but you gotta position these things exactly the right way or else it won't go together so I'm trying to see if I can fix this thing. So we have had, well not a lot, but we've had some stuff break on our trips out here so we're slowly learning how to pack stuff and what can kind of make the journey out here and what just doesn't cut it and apparently this little camp stove she didn't cut it this time. Okay I think I got it back together how it actually goes. See if we can heat up our water make some coffee. All right this is gonna be one heck of a cup of coffee. Been waiting for one of these all day. We're tired. We're gonna drink this coffee. We're gonna sit on that deck and we're gonna keep an eye on our tip-ups. This is my kind of fishing here today. It's extremely hot. We didn't bring sugar. No luck yet. We're taking a little evening stroll down here on the lake. This is one of the trees on our property. I don't know if you can tell but the top of that maybe like the top half of that tree fell off since the last time we were here. The last time we were out here is when we took down those trees around the cabin so I'm glad we got them down. These trees these dead ones they fall all the time. So it is mid-march and it's pretty cool we came back out to the cabin. We weren't really sure if we'd get another trip in because the ice you never really know when things can break up and it's been a little warm you can get overflow. Clearly there was a lot of overflow here at one time and you can hear that crunch is ice so it's not snow I'm walking on. I'm walking on ice which means there was overflow at one time like slushy ice and it's hardened again now. You just gotta remember to be really careful out here. Eric and I are pretty cautious. We've learned a lot in the few winters we've been here about overflow and getting stuck and being all by yourself so we don't want that to happen. We didn't catch any fish today. We're gonna pull the tip ups and we're gonna head up to the cabin. Starting to get a little dark out. I tried to come down here without my snowshoes on and I sunk in like a foot of overflow. I don't know if you can see right here. That's overflow. Really sucks getting stuck in that stuff. So we're gonna get our stuff we're gonna head up to the cabin. Caught me a hot dog. Eric thought it'd be pretty clever to put this rope here. Actually I think it was my idea but Eric did it. Really excited about this because it's actually pretty difficult to come to and fro. It's very slippery so we slide a lot. This is perfect. We made it back up and we're inside the cabin for the night. Got our slippers on and everything. We're gonna see if we get this little lantern fired up. Both of us have actually never used one of these but it's pretty simple. I think you just pop it up and light it but first we're gonna fill it up with some of our fuel. I don't have a little funnel so I'm gonna put like a little rag down or something. Alright I'm gonna put some paper towels down so I'm probably gonna spill a little bit. Let's see if we can fill this up. Drink that. Well that wasn't working and I went looking around the little cabin to see if there was a little funnel here and there's actually a fuel filler made by Coleman and a filter funnel. So sweet. I think this is oh yeah this is perfect. It has a little filter on it. You can use that and then what's this? I think this hooks right. No it doesn't. I don't know what this hooks to. Yeah it says it hooks right on install on Coleman fuel can. That's not Coleman it's Chevron. Yeah maybe it just doesn't fit that. Just doesn't fit this one. Anyways cool we'll use this right? Sweet. Let's see if this thing lights. I don't know if you have to let it sit the first time you use it or not. Let's see. Oh my gosh. Was that for real? That was for real. I think I need to tone down that wick a little. Is it supposed to be doing that? I don't. I think you should extinguish the fire. You can't extinguish it by blowing it out can you? Oh. So I wasn't expecting that. I'm gonna take this thing outside and see if we can light it. It said in the manual this thing has to get up to like operating temperature. It said there might be some smoke at the beginning. I'm gonna it said it'll take about five minutes so I'm gonna let this thing burn for about five minutes and we'll see where we're at. Well we got it going thanks to Ariel. It said you want the wick a sixteenth of an inch above the flame plate and I thought that little you know globe part and there was a flame plate but this is the flame plate and I lowered it down so that's lowered down. That's raised up so I got it cranked way down in there. You can go real low or you can go just about like that. This is awesome. Really cool lantern. We got like I said we have four gallons of fuel for this thing and I forget what the specs are on this lantern but we bought this one because it puts off a pretty good flame and it burns for a long time. These things are really efficient so really cool little lantern. Let's bring it inside. Pretty cool. Not a crazy amount of light at all. I mean it's a it's a little lantern but that's pretty nice. Way brighter than like a few candles so let's get another candle going. We're getting all the lights going. Lighting up the little cabin. We're getting ready for dinner. We're making something well I think it sounds pretty good. I'm gonna do like some mousse steaks and then we're gonna do a coconut mushroom white rice. Should be awesome. Getting ready to cook and I just realized that I forgot my little container of olive oil at home so we're gonna improvise. I think Errol's got a little bit of extra coconut oil and then we're just not going to use oil. So I got my rice here. I got my herbs. I've got some dried mushrooms and we bought a can of coconut milk. This is what we're going to be cooking the rice in and I'm also going to first soak these mushrooms in a little bit of the coconut milk and a little bit of water. Who was your favorite character on SpongeBob Squarepants? Sponge. The sponge on me too. Everyone loves SpongeBob. Who are you gonna like? Plankton? Squidward? Mr. Krabs. Is there any way I could get like a dab? You try some. Is it not good? Oh my gosh. Be good in coffee. I think I would like to bathe in this. It's like lotion. Get out of here. Are you serious? You're gonna eat it all. All we're doing is rehydrating these mushrooms. We have morels which are like that. That's a little small one and then we have winter chanterelles or they also call them yellowfoot chanterelles. Those are probably my favorite mushroom I have ever eaten. We'll let these soak for probably about I don't know 15 or 20 minutes. I'm gonna get our moose roast over here. I'm gonna get a couple steaks cut up off of it. It's still frozen so we'll see what we can do. So these are the knives that came with the cabin. I researched them when I got home. They're a Japanese knife. National cutlery. I don't think they make them anymore. I saw some for sale on eBay but they seem like pretty high quality knives and these ones are razor sharp. They look brand new. Let's see how they do cutting through this moose roast. Oh my gosh look at that. This knife is so sharp. All right this turned out great. That coconut smells amazing in there. We're gonna eat and I think we're gonna hit the sack pretty soon after. It's been a long day. Careful it's hot. Thanks baby. We gotta share that knife. Is the meat any good? Yeah it's spicy.