This is the second week of our “Off the Beaten Path” web journal and I really should give credit to the person (or persons) who helped me come up with the title. Grand Marais community radio station WTIP recently had their summer membership drive they had named….Off the Beaten Path. The membership levels were named for different places in Cook County that were, of course, off the beaten path. During the drive they had interviews with different people who worked in lesser inhabitated places in the county. One morning during their AM Community Calendar show, Bob Carter, one of the hosts interviewed me. He said he couldn’t think of anyone else he knew in the county that lived more off the beaten path than Mark and I. While I was thinking of a name for the web journal the name just seemed to fit.

People wonder if we get bored out here in the woods not having power and television. The one thing we have learned is there is always something to do, as everything is just a little more work. For instance, to get our water supply for the day, we just don’t turn on the tap. We load 10-12 five gallon buckets into the four-wheeler trailer, drive to the well and hand pump water into the buckets. It takes sixty to seventy pumps to fill a five gallon bucket, times 10-12 buckets every day, times seven days a week, 365 days a year. We have been living here now for 21 months, which means we have pumped the well over 450,000 times!!!!

Lately we have been trying to stay ahead of the curve and have been rebuilding our woodshed and cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for winter. With the weather we have been having this summer it’s hard to believe snowfall is probably less than three months away! This summer we have also been busy building a couple of shrub gardens and working on cleaning up our yard. We hope by next summer to have an area ready for planting a small vegetable garden or greenhouse.

We have also been enjoying feeding and watching the birds. This spring we found two active bird nests in our yard and had little ones hatch! Along with feeding the birds we have a pack of chipmunks that have been eating us out of house and home. We have resorted to buying whole corn just for them or they will clean out five bird feeders in an afternoon.

On rainy days, we do fire up the generator and watch a movie or two. With the lack of rain this summer, we haven’t been doing much of that. The one thing that we do nearly every Friday night for entertainment is play WTIP’s call-in trivia show, Small Change. We make sure the dogs are fed, the cell phone is charged up and we are showered by 7:00 on Fridays for their hour-long show. The show has a cult-like following as people call in with their answers from all around the county. The station web-streams and we have heard people call in from all over the country.

OK, the scorching weather can end anytime soon. The last couple of days have been sweltering with high temps, high humidity and not much wind. I guess we shouldn’t complain too much as it won’t be long and we will be shivering when it gets below 40!

The dogs are much smarter than their human companions. When it is hot like this the only “work” they do is digging holes under their houses to get to the cooler earth below. Erin and Matty have full “basements” under their houses. Us humans still work around the yard like it’s much cooler out and complain about being so hot and sweaty! If we only had their brains.

If you’re wondering what the Moose Loop is it was the name given to our road, the Camp 15 Loop, many years ago by the local mushers since there were always so many moose in the vicinity. We haven’t seen many moose lately, but Mark and I found this set of horns this spring. We have been told they would “score” well on the Boone and Crockett scale, but haven’t had a chance to get them in yet. We found a total of 20 horns including three sets this spring. I thought I would also add this picture to two moose calves that was in the Cook County paper a couple of weeks ago.

While we are “melting on the Moose Loop” we hope you are staying cool. Feel free to let us know how you are doing by adding a post of your own to this journal. We’d love to hear from you.

Not much happening here off the beaten path. The big news in Northeastern Minnesota in the last two weeks has been the Cavity Lake wildfire which has burned 39 square miles in the Boundary Waters. As of this last weekend the threat of it moving toward the Gunflint Trail has been eased, but after nearly two weeks it is only 35% contained.

Here on the Camp 15 Loop, we haven’t had much effect from the fire except for the first weekend when the winds carried the smoke 45 miles to the east over to us.  I am playing softball this year with a group of women from the end of the Gunflint Trail and for a couple of days things were pretty tense for all of them.

Wildfire is our biggest fear living so far from the county road. We have our dog truck parked at a friend’s house ten miles down the hill from the cabin, so if one flared up near us, a dog evacuation could not be done quickly. We currently have 39 dogs (including Roxy, the house dog) and our truck only holds 24. Fortunately in the last couple of days, we have received nearly 2 1/2 inches of rain, so the threat has been eased.

If you are interested in finding out more on the fire and what is happening on the end of the Gunflint Trail, log on to http://www.boundarywatersblog.com/. Sue Prom, one of my softball co-horts, co-owner of Voyageaur Canoe Outfitters has some great stories and photos on the blog related to the fire.

Happy Trails!

Hello everyone! Welcome to our “Off the Beaten Path” journal. We are working on getting our website updated, so keep checking back for new and exciting things. We would like to thank Tone Coughlin for taking time to work on updating our site. He is doing a great job and we are looking forward to a new look.

For those of you that are visiting for the first time, “Off the Beaten Path” isn’t just a name for our journal it is how we live. We are six miles from the county road and in the winter time, the only way to travel that six miles is either by dog team or snomobile. We are also ten miles from the power grid so it makes everyday life more work, but we love our little piece of heaven.

I will be updating the journal regularly, so keep checking back. Check out the photos that we took of our kennel from on the roof of the cabin. That’s our whole crew…you get a bird’s eye view.

We hope everyone is having a great summer, won’t be long and the harnesses will be coming out and training for the 2007 race season will be well under way!

See you soon!

Mary

Testing the Newsline.

Here are pics of the Kennel!