Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Top Secret Training Plan and Birch Sap


Well I didn’t make the national team, so life goes on as usual in the land of the midnight sun. And actually it’s going along really well. I kept the training pretty steady through April, following a top-secret training plan put together by Graham Nishikawa (thanks Nish). Also new to the Yukon Elite Squad coaching staff is Coach Pav, returning from Ontario. Usually there’s a maximum of two at our intensity workouts, now I’ll at least have someone cheering me on.

It seems like the race season is my time to relax, now that its over I’m busier than ever. Here’s a little taste of what I’ve been up to…

 As part of our sponsorship with Air North, Colin and I flew up to Old Crow in April to ski with the local kids.

Old Crow has a rich history in Cross Country skiing that goes back to the T.E.S.T. days where Father Mouchet coahed the Gwitchin First Nation’s people into national champions. However skiing has died out in the community in the last couple decades. It was great to see the kids getting outside and enjoying the snow that lasts until may!

Trapping is a big part of Old Crow and is still many peoples livelihood. We set a few snares along the ski trails and cooked up a rabbit stew for dinner!

Collecting birch sap: I have a bad habit of under taking projects I really don’t have time for and this was one of them. As you probably know I’m really into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. My favorite foods are meat, berries, and sugar. Meat and berries are generally easy to come by in the Yukon but sugars like honey or syrup are not. With the exception of a short stint in Quebec, I’ve never made syrup. Unfortunately there’s no maples in the Yukon, but you can find the odd birch. They’re the only hardwood found in the Yukon and apparently you can make syrup from it.

I cut a bunch of pipe, drilled some holes in trees, stuck the pipe in there, hung a 4L milk jug, and before you know it I had an operation taking in over a hundred litres of birch sap a day.



Colin helped me collect the sap, and my dog helped drink it

Its a 100:1 ratio of sap to syrup, lots of boiling

finished product after a week of collecting 800L of sap. 8 litres of syrup and a really high electricity bill

As you could imagine it was hard to boil off a hundred litres of water a day. I started on my kitchen stove and had to expand to my nieghbour’s stove, Colin’s bbq and an outside fire pit. Even then it was hard to keep up and you have to keep up because the sap will spoil in a couple days if not used. This got me started on my next project.

I’d left a barrel a little too long. “Smells a little fermented I thought” then I thought a little more. Then I had 3 barrels of birch beer fermenting in my laundry room.


Colin pouring the yeast over a piece of rye bread floating in honey birch sap

Some of the finished product

My first bottle bomb. 160fl oz of beer down the drain. By down the drain I mean all over my bedroom floor. Maybe I'll measure my priming sugar next time.

The beer should be ready for drinking in a few weeks. I'll probably share some.

My friend Malkolm landed me this sweet opportunity to get flown up to the Kluane Icefields at the base of Mt Logan. The deal was I get a free flight and all I had to do was help with digging out the cache. Wouldn’t you know it, Mt Logan gets 3 meters of snow a year. And wouldn’t you also know it, digging out the “cache” involved hauling out full size propane ovens frozen in ice, 3 meters deep.

Our hole/cave. still a few things buried in there

jumping over our hole with ice axes

Hard work aside, we enjoyed the worlds largest non-polar ice field to ourselves. 
Not bad

I’ve also been able to fit in a little fishing. We skied into a remote lake and were slaying some little lake trout through the ice



white tube jig with some belly meat on it

smallest lake trout ever caught?

going for a hike with a stringer of trout 

sailing canoes on Tutshi Lake with our tent fly

May long weekend

Colin owning everyone at disc golf

Work is pretty steady on the side of things. This guy’s getting a new kitchen in his rental unit.

Nice work there Jonathan Kerr.

And thats about it. I'll save the rest for the next blog post.