The woodstove isn't warm. Neither is winter. Get over it.

A quick post on my way to a week off in the subtropics. I skied out of the Zealand valley this morning in -20 degree sunshine. A beautiful morning, even if it was snot-freezing cold. I weathered fairly well my last week up there, following the MLK holiday weekend. The hut was full with guests on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, but for the last three nights of my stint, as temps dropped below zero, I saw not one other human soul (about other souls seen, more later).

Over the weekend, it was my pleasure to host the excellent people who constitute the AMC's young members group from Connecticut. Also in attendance were a few (not as many as they'd hoped) of the good people of the Maine chapter, which, as my AMC mailings still get sent to my parents' mailbox in Maine, is my chapter as well. I'm not the most gregarious guy, but there really was a good time in the hut while these people were around.

Unfortunately, as temps dived into negative numbers, this was also a weekend for one of the more difficult aspects of caretaking: woodstove diplomacy.

Now, our woodstove operates primarily by means of the placebo effect, for there's little real good it can do to warm a large, drafty building on a mountainside in the winter. With only two or three trees that were allowed to use annually for firewood, we have to ration what fuel we have to burning just a few logs a night, in the evening only. On nights like Sunday, when the hut was full of 98 degree bodies and the steam of their heated dinners, the caretaker will use less wood to conserve for colder nights. Indeed, the hut's indoor temperature was balmy enough for people to strip down to a single layer, which is unheard of, for winter camping. Still, the stove never gets as warm as some people would like it to be, and bearing complaints is diffucult, especially when there's little that I can reasonably do about it. Cutting more trees certainly isn't an option, and by the time guests have arrived at the hut, it's too late to tell them to pack more warm clothing.

Ironically, the best way to deal with daytime temps that struggle to reach double digits on the positive end of the Fahrenheit scale is to get out of the hut and climb to the top of an even colder mountaintop. Last week I climbed Mts. Hale and Zealand in efforts to stoke my internal furnace, and on these expeditions I was reliably warmer than I was on days when I elected to spend as much time as I could reading in my warm down sleeping bag.

I shoved off this morning from the hut right after the 8 AM radio call and was back for this brief stop at Pinkham Notch by 10 am. Next it's on to the Portland "International Jetport", and then to the Houston "George Bush Intercontinental Airport" by the evening (the name of the Houston airport is more pompous by a hair, but Portland's has more pretension, given that it serves mostly small commuter planes from a single homey terminal, and none of its flights are international). There I'll take a trip to the oily beaches of the gulf coast and live it up in my Hawaiian shirt. Yippie kai-yea, git along, yee-haw.

What I'm reading now:

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
I've actually been reading this concomitantly with other books for a while now. Reisner is too partisan to be considered a serious historical arbiter of the facts, but he does present some fascinating and well-researched stories of water exploitation in the American west. It's a long book, but that's because there are so many stories of stunning ineptitude, corruption, and destruction, and Reisner tells them all with an outraged storyteller's flair.