Snow at the Off Grid Cabin | Byron Glacier Ice Caves

I don't know if you guys have ever seen the movie The Water Boy but this is the same stuff right here. Water from a glacier in Alaska. That's high-quality H2O. Good morning everyone. We are out for a awesome hike today. We are headed to Byron Glacier. This is a hike that Eric and I have wanted to do for a while. We've done Portage Glacier which is in also in this area. We got up early today. We are a few hours away from where we live. It was like sub-zero temps and I think it's a warm 20 degrees here. Yep, so it's freezing cold. We're gonna get hiking up the valley and I think we can see the glacier. It is right there. I don't know if you can see that through the camera but it said it was only a mile. It looks a lot further than a mile. We're gonna keep hiking. Come on Bo, come on. There's a bench here and we've read that it can be a little bit tricky to get past it. It doesn't look that bad but I don't really quite know where the cave is. We're supposed to come up to a cave. Yeah you can see behind me that glacier that was pointing at earlier is still up there. Pretty sure when the sign said a mile that was probably to right here. So I feel like we've probably been a mile so far. We've got this little lookout here that looks at the glacier but we want to go up to the glacier because there's a cave you can go in. So we're gonna see if we can find a trail from here that leads up that mountain. I see a human in the distance. Oh yeah. Let's head that way. We can see both of the caves. I'm gonna call them. There's two it looks like. Super. Right there I think. Yeah super excited to go in those. They're not that far. Oh I just saw that huge one to the left. Yes that's what I was saying. There's two. Maybe a quarter mile. So we're gonna head that way. Run. Go Bo go. Run Bo. Alright we officially have made it to the glacier and now we are gonna touch the glacier. We've never done this before. It is cold. It's just like a real smooth beautiful ice. What do you think? I think we should go in. Looks like Bandit already beat us to it. This cave. It looks like there's a few different caves. This one is massive. I don't know how tall that is but let's go check it out. Bandit what do you think? Well probably about halfway into this thing and I noticed right when we got in here it got a lot colder. Probably like 20 degrees outside but definitely a lot more chilly inside this glacier. This thing is awesome. So behind me is where we just came in. It's probably extremely loud in here. There's like a river or a glacier fed creek coming out of this thing and you can see behind me it's pretty dark this way and there's another glacier over there and then right here there's a really cool spot where it kind of opens up when the sun comes down in. This thing is absolutely massive in here. Anyways I got Bandit with me. Errol's over there taking pictures. Bo got scared. So he's waiting for us at the entrance. I got my flashlight. I'm gonna see what it looks like in this dark area. So I don't know if you can see that but that looks like a spot where the glacier collapsed and it's kind of blocking the trail. Probably a good sign not to go that way. I'm gonna hike back down and go check out that other cave. Come on man. Okay so this is super fun. Extremely sketchy. The other tunnel was collapsed. This one looks like it's a little bit better but it's pretty creepy actually and it's really slippery so we gotta pay attention. Bandit! Yeah this tunnel looks, this one's a lot smaller. It's getting narrower too. Man this is so cool in here. I don't know if you can tell but the other one we were in that was like 40 feet tall. This one's like maybe eight? Well no. I can't touch it so. I can touch it. So it's probably like seven feet tall. Look at the ground here too. It's starting to freeze. Wow. So here's another spot where this thing collapsed at one point. There's some big ice chunks here on the ground. It goes further than I can see but I don't think I'm gonna go much further. Definitely turned into a scary movie. We watched that movie The Descent not that long ago. So we're probably gonna not go any further. The ceiling gets pretty low back there. I'm gonna start hiking out towards the front. We're probably a couple hundred feet in though. This is pretty cool cave in here. All right this is a blast. I think we're done in here. We got what we came for. We left Bo at the beginning so we have to go back and get him. Definitely dress appropriately if you come out here. We got lucky. This is a warm-ish day and it's wonderful. You know it's not too bad as far as slipping and it's sunny outside but it is it's sketchy. You got to be careful in the cave. I'm so thirsty now. Bo? Bo? Where'd you go Bo? Where'd you go? Did you get scared? What's wrong with you? Why are you so scared? Well we found Bo. We had a great day and we're starting to hike back. We had an awesome time out here at the Byron Glacier but we will see you guys at the cabin. Bye. Look behind you. from our trip to the glacier and it's pretty cold here too but we have a storm coming in tonight and I think it's about 3 o'clock in the afternoon right now and it's actually already starting to snow so we're supposed to get a ton of snow this weekend. They're calling for 7 inches on Saturday, 7 inches on Sunday and we do have some snow here already but not enough to have plowed so that's what we're doing right now. We're gonna hook up the plow on the Polaris. I need to get the mount to put on the Polaris and then we can actually hook the snow I've got the gun cases off. I'm gonna put these away until next season and we're gonna get the gas in the snow blower. We're gonna get that thing fired up and we're gonna get that thing over to the woodshed because that's where it's gonna stay this winter and we just want to make sure it's running good for us. Okay it's been a while since we started or it's cold but luckily you can plug this thing into an outlet. So I'm gonna fire up the generator and plug this in and push gonna be ready to snow plow tomorrow or the next day whenever we get to it. I'm gonna give you guys a quick update on the woodshed since we really haven't shown you the woodshed since we built it. We're still absolutely loving this thing. We love looking at it. It's beautiful. We have the Polaris snow machine parked in here. It doesn't exactly fit. The skis stick out a little bit but this is a little bit of a longer machine. This actually was frozen behind the house and it kind of was parked where our shower runoff kind of goes. So we had to like chip this thing out of the ice yesterday. But this thing's good to go for the winter. We got the other one out there with the cover on it. We've used I mean quite a bit of wood. We pretty much burned wood in the summer. It was like a really cold summer. So we had one stack on this side that was kind of like a makeshift stack all the way up. We burned all that and then back over on this side which is where we're gonna start really pulling from. We had a whole stack here and then this stack went all the way to the top and we've burned all that. So we haven't gone through too much but I'm pretty sure that now one of these stacks that are outside. We have one on this side, one on that side. I'm pretty sure that this will now be able to fit in here. So I think when we're done plowing after this storm we're gonna untarp this, fold this tarp, get it put away and then we're gonna try to stack all this wood in there. And then as the season goes on we're gonna try to use that stack. Before we head inside for the night, Arrow wants to show you guys something over at the garden because we had some visitors over there last night. So we decided this year to take down some of our garden fencing. We had this little section that we had to connect with the other part and when I tried to get our snow blower in here it's just like a really tight turn. So we're like you know what let's just take the fencing down and thought that that would be a genius idea. It had been working for a little while and we were going to you know snow plow this time around. We have a few inches from the last storm but we haven't done any snow removal yet. Well unfortunately some moose decided that they wanted to come in and enjoy what we had left in the garden. So two nights ago we actually had a mom and a baby in here and they didn't do too much damage. They did get to our lilac unfortunately and they ate lots of strawberries. And then last night we had a sole baby come on her own. She didn't have a mom. He or she didn't have a mom. And same thing, just ate more strawberries. You can see they did all this kind of damage and this isn't really a big deal to me because these aren't perennials and it's not even a huge deal for the strawberries because that's just the foliage. They didn't get to the roots. However that just didn't work out like I planned. So I'm not sure if we're gonna be able to leave the fence down every year. We're gonna get a lot more snow in here. I'm guessing with this next storm and I'm hoping that that prevents them from coming in here. We're not sure yet but we may have to put the fencing back up. I want to show you guys something on the other side of the garden. So this is some of the strawberry damage that they did and we actually tried to shoo the moose out of here a little bit and she did jump the fence and kind of damaged it a little bit too. So they can jump these fences no problem. Eric and I have already taken down our you know poly wire which is electrified in the spring summer and fall months and we have also taken it down on our orchard which is part of our just winter prep. And it's super clear that if we did not have that wire that they would be in here because the fence has only been down for about a week and they've already visited twice. Eric and I are gonna head inside before these storm hits. Well good morning guys. Turns out that the snowstorm they were calling for where we're at has turned into a rainstorm. Probably got about an inch maybe two inches of snow but now it's raining everything's melting but we did hear that downtown they got hammered with snow. So we have to go fill up our gas cans and we're gonna go down there and check out the snow. Alaskan carwash. We just left our house and when we did it was 37 degrees and it was raining and we came down the hill and it is now 31 degrees and it's snowing so they're station a lot of snow down here and for info gas is $2.39 a gallon right now. Well we got our fuel and the plan was to take the dogs on a little hike down here but they haven't plowed pretty much anywhere. If we stop we get stuck so I got to keep my momentum up on this road and we're circling around the block and we're gonna head up to the cabin. What are you doing? Babe it's not wet at all. It's all fluffy. That's no good dude. That was no good. Ready? Yeah. Come here babe. Oh I'm pretty sure the wood's gonna come down right now. We're all done with our snow removal for the day and we're gonna finish things up with stacking that big old pile of wood right here in the woodshed. We didn't end up getting that much snow in fact I think we only got like six inches or something like that but it was good workout to get rid of that. We went down into town because they had a lot more in fact we checked out our other property and there was a good two feet there. Really fun. I'm a little bit jealous because we wanted to go riding here but we're just gonna have to wait until we get more snow. So we've got our work cut out for us for the rest of the day. We're gonna finish stacking this wood and we'll see you guys next time.