Beautiful day!  Cold, bright, sunny.  The sea is calm.  It is the kind of day you say to yourself, “Wow! Today would be a good day to go and do such-and-such!”

And then you bundle up, get your tools and head out to undertake the task-at-hand only to feel your hands go numb and your nose-hairs get needle-hard.  Then your ears fall off.  It is really too cold to do anything and, like the bunny-kins you really are, you quickly retreat to the warmth of the cabin and make yourself a nice hot chocolate. 

Well, I do, anyway.   

I know, I know………..all you easterners and prairie-types think you know cold and -3F is NOT cold, you say.  But it is!  Cold near the water is colder than the dry-ice type cold of the interior.  That’s what everyone says and this time I believe them.  Hell, that interior kind of cold isn’t really cold until it is 25 below.  You want real cold?  Try 25 below in a storm on the coast when the ocean freezes spray on your face!

‘Course, I am just talkin’ big because I don’t even think about going out when it is -5 degrees.  I mean, ‘who am I trying to impress?’

I mention all this because I have been checking in lately with Chris Czajkowski, the author.  Chris Czajkowski of Nuk Tessli goes out in this and doesn’t think twice.  She is the intrepid, gettin’-on, single woman who has carved a lifestyle and reputation out of the wilderness for the past thirty years up and around the Caribou/Chilcotin area.  It gets to 50 below up there!  She used to hike by snowshoe for four days into her cabin alone except for a dog for company and built her cabin by hand and axe.  She is a tough chick – one of those eccentric, bicycle-across-the-Himalaya English-types who do it alone and live on only crackers and cheese.  Like Sal.       

CC was one of the inspirations for the adventure Sal and I are currently on.  Sally and Ian Wilson (two adventurers in the 80’s and 90’s) were two more and the gang at the Mother Earth News forum added to the urge-to-homestead, off-the-grid madness we have embraced with their encouragement and knowledge. 

In other words, we have plenty of people on whom to spread the blame.