With early season archery elk behind me, it’s now time to focus on preparing for winter. My wife, myself, and our two little ones finally made it up to our cabin in order to leverage the last two weeks of my paternity leave to relax (some) and get a head start on wood chopping and fall cabin cleaning.

My daughter and I working the log splitter at our cabin.

Over the last two winters here in Atlanta, Idaho (where snow accumulations often reach over seven feet) we have been able to dial in our needs pretty well. With our small 900 sf cabin, we have two wood burning stoves, one upstairs and one downstairs, which requires about four and a half cords of wood to get us through the winter and into spring. A cord of wood roughly equates 128 cubic feet, or about a full-sized truck bed of wood stacked 4 feet high. It takes a few trees to get what we need and comes in at thousands of pounds. Pounds of whole round pine that needs to all be lifted, split on a log splitter, and then carried and placed into our wood shed for easy access during the long winter months.

Now, in the past I would split all of our wood with an axe with the intention of getting a good workout in over the summer months. But, with the new addition to our family and hunting commitments this summer I only had a very small (one week) window to get our wood acquired, split, and stacked. This meant that for the past week I have been cutting non-stop.

With my wife fully on infant duty with breast feeding, I had to take advantage of the hours that I had to get stuff done… which meant that our oldest daughter (1.5 years old) was my side kick for much of my morning splitting. She thankfully was very keen and did well strapped to my back (with proper hearing and eye protection) while I split whole round after whole round for hours at a time. She even sang me her favorite Cocomelon songs loudly in my ears as we toiled away.

~3 cords of wood stacked in our “5-cord” woodshed

All in, we were able to get about 3 of our 4.5 cords split and stacked and will have to postpone the last 1.5 cords until we are back later in October. The rest of the time we had needed to be spent relaxing with the family, cleaning, and celebrating my wife’s birthday. We even got in some reading time and cold plunges down by the river and my wife got some alone time at our hot springs. All of the goings-on at the cabin the last two weeks has reminded us how lucky we are to get to live where we do!

~36* water is a good shock to the system, especially followed by ~110* hot springs

Our youngest about to get in some river-side naps.

Let Me Die Learning

Splitting Wood