Seney, Michigan Our New Home

Well we made it. It’s official we are finally living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP). We are about an hour and a half from the Mackinaw Bridge which connects the lower and upper peninsulas and where Lake Michigan and Huron meet. For those of you not familiar with where Seney is here is a map to help you get your barring.

UP Map (I couldn't find a map that would load and had Seney listed on it. This is the best I could do. Seney is a half hour south of Munising.)

You may remember from previous blogs that dave’s family has land and a small cabin about 10 miles north of Seney. He grew up hunting grouse there and driving by the refuge entrance sign.

Seney Entrance Sign

We got here about a month ago and have settled in nicely. We are living in refuge housing so dave is able to walk to work everyday and the resident wildlife have been introducing themselves, frisky with the coming spring.

Front of Our House

About two weeks after we got here the moving van arrived with the rest of our stuff. Needless to say I was going stir crazy with not much going on and nothing to unpack and get settled. But there was no mistaking the huge Alaska moving van when it finally arrived and somehow managed to make the tight turns to park in front of our place.

Moving Van

dave likes his new job and is getting a chance to work on many projects which should give him great experience for a Fire Management Officer position sometime in the near future. He is currently working on the Refuge aviation plan and is getting used to his new skills driving the MarshMaster. Since this tracked vehicle can also float it is a handy fire tool to have here with so many wetlands.

dave and Gary on MarshMaster

I will be working at the visitor center once it opens in mid May and will also be assisting with any prescribed burns and wildfires that arise. I will also be hard at work on the garden which has been started on the property. I already have a bunch of seedlings started and hope to have quite a bounty of fresh veggies throughout the summer and into the fall.

That’s about it from us. Remember you’re always welcome to come for a visit. And if you’ve never been to the UP now is a good as time as ever!!

Collecting our Things in Alaska

Big news!! dave has accepted a job in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) working as a wildland firefighter for Seney National Wildlife Refuge (US Fish and Wildlife Service) . We had hoped to continue our travels but the lack of funding caused us to reconsider. We had been looking for jobs in the UP but nothing looked promising until after we had already put feelers out back in Alaska. Just when it seemed a sure thing that we would be returning to the Last Frontier, a job opened at the refuge both of us had dreamed of working at. So we’re moving to the UP. But first we had to collect our things from our storage unit in Fairbanks. We had left enough stuff in our 10X10 unit to furnish a small cabin when we got done with our travels. Turns out we left more than we thought. When we opened the unit for the first time since July 2006, we were overwhelmed with how much stuff there really was.

Storage Unit in July 2006

We weren’t sure when we would get back to Alaska after this trip so we decided to do it properly and see as many folks as we could. We started by flying to Anchorage and stayed a couple nights with our friends Mary and Shane. (You may remember them from the Anchorage blog post in August 2006. Mary and I worked together in Coldfoot at the Arctic Interagency Visitor Center.) They had been living in Anchorage for a couple of years and were about to move back to Fairbanks shortly after we saw them. We had a wonderful visit with them and in the process realized how home sick we were for Alaska.

From Anchorage we took the train, something we have always wanted to do, from Anchorage to Denali National Park. As you can imagine there weren’t many folks traveling in Alaska in late February so we pretty much had the train to ourselves.

The Gang at the Train Station (Maddie is Sprout’s seven pound best friend. She remembered us and seemed a little bummed Sprout wasn’t there to play with her.)

The Train

jody on Train

dave Eating Lunch on the Train (It was expensive but we figured this may be the only time we ever do it.)

While on the train we crossed both the Alaska and the Talkeetna Mountain Ranges. We saw a bunch of moose and some classic Alaska winter mountain scenes along the way.

Alaska Range

Scenery

We made a couple of interesting stops along the way. First we picked up a grandfather, father, daughter and their dog in the small town of Talkeetna. They were going to their cabin for the weekend. They had a sled and some gear and were dressed to walk the mile or so to reach their place. Their cabin is only accessible by foot but the train gets them a lot closer to it then if they were to walk from Talkeetna. It was kind of neat dropping them off on the side of the tracks and as we pulled away watching them start the hike to the cabin which you could just barely see through the trees. The conductor said they would get picked up the next day on the train’s way south.

We also made a couple of postal deliveries. There are a few folks who live pretty far off the beaten track but the train goes near their cabins. When the railroad was sold to the current company there was a clause attached that said they had to maintain the postal deliveries to these folks since it is one of only a few ways they can get supplies. (I guess they could also have them air dropped in but the expense would be extremely high.) So about three times we stopped at a small box next to the tracks and the conductor dropped a box out the side door and slid it off the tracks. It was a little tough for him to actually get the delivery into the mailbox because the snow was so deep. He said the folks usually hear the train whistle and are probably on their way down to pick up the delivery so it wasn’t such a big deal that it was left laying in the open.

Rural Mailbox

We knew we were getting close to our stop (our friends Bob and Cyn’s place - dave and Bob worked together at Alaska Fire Service) when we saw the huge cutbank next to Carlos Creek in the distance. Bob and Cyn’s cabin is in between the cutbank and the creek. We traveled about 10 or 15 miles further north, just inside the Denali National Park boundary, before the train let us off. Now the park is pretty much shut down in the winter along with most of the surrounding “village” but Bob and Cyn said they would pick us up at the train stop. The conductor thought we were crazy getting out there and made sure our ride was there before they left us standing in knee deep snow. We had a great visit with them catching up, eating and of course, drinking some beers.

Carlos Creek Cutbank from the Train

We spent the night with Bob and Cyn and in the morning after a great home cooked breakfast we jumped in Cyn’s car, which she so graciously let us borrow, and drove to Fairbanks (about 3 hours or so).

The most important item we had to do during our ten day stay in Fairbanks was to rendezvous with the moving company so they could pack our storage unit onto a moving van. Before we met up with them, we sorted through the unit and dug out our ice skates, cross country skis and other miscellaneous winter gear so we could properly enjoy our time in Fairbanks. We took advantage of the nice, sunny weather and played a bunch of hockey and skied a fair number of the groomed trails.

jody Skiing

dave Playing Hockey

We stayed with dave’s pervious supervisor and his wife, Dave and Randy. It sure beat staying in Cyn’s car and couch surfing as we originally thought we would do. Ironically we don’t have any photos of Dave and Randy but we do have a couple of their horses. We had a nice time visiting with them, catching up on the latest events at Alaska Fire Service and hearing about their new place in Idaho.

dave with Lenny and Cozmo

Lenny Close Up and Personal

The Festival of Native Arts happened to be taking place during our visit. Neither of us had been to the event before so we stopped in for one of the evening performances. Native dance groups from all over the state come to Fairbanks to show off their skills in this annual, free public event.

Anatuvuk Pass Dancers (Anatuvuk Pass is a small village in the Brooks Range.)

Alaska Native Heritage Dancers (The Native Heritage Center is in Anchorage and displays artifacts from various villages throughout the state. They have a dance group consisting of mostly high school students from different villages. They do public performances at the center most nights during the summer. If you are planning a trip to Alaska this is a must see.)

Minto Dancers (Minto is one of the few small villages in the state on the road system.)

The Ice Carving Festival was also taking place. This two week long event features folks from all over the world carving both single and multi block sculptures. Unfortunately we were not going to be around at the end of the festival when all the sculptures would be completed. But we were able to see folks working on the multi block sculptures. The children’s area is completed first and usually has a variety of ice slides, ice mazes and other hands on activities. Next to it is the single block ice sculptures. Both these and the multi block sculptures are judged and prizes are awarded. Farthest from the entrance are the multi block ice sculptures. Since the single block entries are judged first, many of those artists team up to work on a multi block sculpture. In past years we have seem some unbelievable sculptures well over head high and some so delicate it was a wonder they could remain standing.

jody in Ice Basket (Who says the children’s area is just for kids?!)

dave in Ice Kayak

One of the Single Block Ice Sculptures

Ice Bocks Waiting to be Used (The harvest the ice from a lake nearby.)

Moving Ice Blocks into Place for Multi Block Competition

They also have a pee wee hockey rink for local kids. It was too funny watching their little legs skate around.

A trip to Fairbanks wouldn’t have been complete without meeting up with the Friday Night Drinking Club. When we first arrived in Alaska in 2002 the biologist at Kanuti Refuge, Lisa, took dave and us under her wing. She invited us to join her Friday Night Drinking Club which consisted mostly of folks she went to graduate school with in Fairbanks. The tradition stuck with us and there were very few Fridays that didn’t see us hanging out at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Pub drinking cheap beer (which everyone made fun of us for) and eating pizza. We remained loyal to that tradition on this trip. Bob and Cyn even made the trip up to dance and drink the night away with us.

During this trip Lisa and her hubbie, Dan, were nice enough to host a potluck so we could see the folks outside the pub. I didn’t get the camera out till a bunch of folks had already left but I was able to catch some of them.

Some of the Friday Night Drinking Club at Lisa and Dan’s

Our last hurrah in Fairbanks was to drive out to Chena Hot Springs and take a nice long soak in their pools. This has been one of our favorite things to do in Alaska, especially during the winter months when there is still snow on the ground. We normally only soak for an hour or so till we shrivel into prunes. But this time we stayed in for hours and took in not only the hot water but a beautiful sunny day.

Chena Hot Springs Rock Lake

The next day we headed back to the airport to start the next chapter of our lives. dave starts his new job in mid March so we have very little time to pack and get our heads around the idea that the UP will be our new home!!

Of course we had to celebrate at the airport during the delirious 14 hour trip back!!

dave Celebrating (Is there any other way to travel??)

Caseville Shanty Days

dave and I have spent the better part of the 2007/2008 winter at the tip of Michigan’s thumb at my folk’s cottage. The plan was to work our little tails off and make as much money as possible to continue our travels through North America. Unfortunately, well maybe fortunately when you see how things worked out, work at the sugar beet factory never materialized after the beet harvest and other jobs proved hard to come by. dave worked for a month and a half with a tree service and can now say the sugar beet factory WAS NOT the worst job he has had in his life. But we did get lucky when it came to snow and with all our free time we took advantage of it even without snowshoes and cross country skis. The snow kept coming and coming all winter long. It was nice for playing in and the shoveling proved to be part of our exercise routine through most of the winter.

dave Shoveling Snow

While the snow was nice … the wind was not. We had gotten so used to hardly any wind in Fairbanks that when the Michigan winter winds began to blow we had a hard time adjusting. In fact recreation on the beach was just about out of the question for the better part of the winter. Good thing we had trails in a variety of forests nearby!

dave and Dogs at Beach During Blizzard

Lucky for us the nearby town of Caseville had just the thing to take away our winter blues, the Shanty Days Festival! I don’t know much about the Shanty Days Festival as this was our first time attending. Caseville holds a huge Cheeseburger in Caseville Festival in August which has been a big hit with the tourists. I think Shanty Days was their winter version. From a first time attendee’s perspective it was a good reason to get outside in the sunshine and have a few beers … well maybe more then a few!

Human bowling started off the festival activities. Unfortunately the sleds seemed to have a mind of their own and rarely made it to the “bowling pins.” Or as you can see in the following photo, the contestant fell off the sled before hitting the pins.

Human Bowling

A broomball tournament was going on throughout the entire weekend. When we arrived we found a guy we worked with at the sugar beet factory immersed in a game. Had we known before hand we could have probably joined his team. (That’s him in the white helmet towards the back.) Broomball is similar to hockey but is played on snow with a blown up rubber ball and with brooms duct taped to prevent the bristles from falling out.

Broomball

The main event at the festival was the outhouse races. I had been trying for weeks to get dave to help me build one but he said he would rather be a spectator instead. After watching it this year if we happen to be in the Caseville area next year I think I can convince him we should enter. The outhouses could be made of anything as long as they were mounted on skis and had a toilet seat and a roll of toilet paper inside. Two people pushed them down a straight, flat course. Nobody had to sit inside it like the Chatinika Outhouse Races in Alaska.

Outhouse Examples (The dual seat outhouse was made by a newlywed couple.)

Outhouse Race (I wish I knew how to add movies to this blog. The movies show the race much better.)

Just after the outhouse races was the event Chick on a Stick. It was pretty simple - two guys carried a girl clinging to a stick down the same course as the outhouse races. Well it seemed pretty simple. You have to remember this festival started around 11:00 in the morning and we were well into the afternoon. Beers had been flowing for the better part of the day, the sun was shining and the girls didn’t look like they were THAT heavy!! Needless to say there were crashes, chicks on sticks were dropped and everyone had a good time.

Chick on a Stick

The last event of the day was the Polar Bear Dip. dave and I had planned to enter the event but when we saw how many others had the same idea we backed out. A local hot tub company set up a hot tub for the contestants to go into after they got out of the freezing water. Unfortunately there were so many people jumping in I don’t think a lot of people were able to get into the tub after their dip. Keep in mind what I mentioned before about the Michigan winter wind. Now imagine jumping into ice cold water and after getting out having to deal with winter wind freezing you to the core and no room in the hot tub.

Polar Bear Dip

The events continued into the local bars and nightclub but we opted out and headed home content in knowing we had just officially been to our first Caseville Shanty Days Festival.

Michigan Sugar Company

dave and I spent the last three months at my parent’s cottage in Michigan. We decided to spend the winter here for two reasons. First after more then a year on the road both of us missed having a home base, somewhere we could call home for a while without moving to a new spot every day. Second we were about to run out of money. If the trip was to continue we needed to buckle down, find a job and earn some money. With the benefit of hindsight Michigan probably was not the best place to find a decent paying job. Due to the decline of the auto industries the economy is in bad shape and many people are out of work. That coupled with staying the winter in a summer community made the possibility of finding a job difficult. The sugar factory in Sebewaing (30 miles southwest) seemed like the perfect solution. They were hiring lots of seasonal help. We decided to take the orientation class and work for the company since none of the other places we applied had called us. At the orientation they told us all the seasonal jobs revolved around the beet harvest and would last about a month but if you proved you were a valuable employee there was a possibility of working in the factory full time through March. So it seemed like the perfect solution to our situation.

Sugar Factory

The Michigan Sugar Company was formed in 1906. It is the largest beet sugar (versus cane) processor east of the Mississippi River and the fourth largest in the United States. The Company became cooperatively owned in 2002 with approximately 1,250 sugarbeet growers and it employs 450 year-round and 1,750 seasonal employees. Michigan Sugar Company produces nearly one billion pounds of sugar annually under the Pioneer and Big Chief brand names - "Locally Grown. Locally Owned."

The farmers in the cooperative all harvest their beets at the same time of year so they need a lot of workers to help pile the beets till they will be used in the factory. While the beets are still in the ground the farmers cut the tops off the beets (they grow like a potato with their leaves above ground) and dig them up with large machinery. They are deposited into large dump trucks which bring them to the factory. The factory is on 80 acres, most of which is a large parking lot. Fifteen pilers were interspersed on the grounds. After getting weighed the trucks drove up to a piler and unloaded their beets. The pilers could accept beets on each side for more efficient unloading. After dumping the beets into the piler the beets were agitated until most of the dirt came off. Then the beets were spit out into HUGE piles and the dirt was put back into the trucks. As each truck left the yard it was weighed again. The farmers were paid for their beets based on weight and sugar content.

Sugar Beet Close Up with Top Attached

dave worked at one of the pilers with three other guys. One guy on each side would help guide the truck into the correct spot to dump. Another guy manned the controls of the machine and the last guy took random samples of beets for sugar content testing and swung the piler boom back and forth to create even piles. By the end of the month the entire 80 acres was covered with beet piles over 20 feet high. dave found out the hard way not to pile the beets higher then 20 feet. The beets need to breathe or they will start to rot before they can be brought into the factory for processing. If you pile them too high they can’t breathe and the yard supervisor will come over to give you an ass chewing.

Truck Dumping Beets into Piler

dave Next to his Pile of Beets

View of Yard from Top of Piler

My job was much different. I worked inside a small shack with about 12 other women. All of the random beet samples taken at the pilers were sent to the shack and ground down into sugarbeet juice. The juice was then sent to a lab and the sugar content was measured. The job was fairly labor intensive since we had to move the beet samples to different stations and many of the guys at the pilers paid no attention to the sample’s 25 pound weight limit. Instead we routinely moved, cleaned and cut up 40-50 pound bags of beets. You didn’t need a gym membership with this job. You got your workout at work!

Unloading the Beets into Buckets (The beets came to us in the green bags and we moved them to each station in the black buckets.)

Kathy Grinding the Dirt off the Beet (We had to wear hair nets to ensure we didn’t get our hair stuck in the grinding wheels like one girl did the year before. I thought it was awfully funny since I had hardly any hair. One lady called them our birth control since we looked so silly in them. Kathy is a wonderful woman who we hope to continue to hang out with.)

Beets Going into Saw (This saw routinely got clogged with beet parts. Instead of letting the ladies working there fix it we had to call in a man to do the work. Needless to say I had a major problem with this. I didn’t need a man to fix a simple problem nor did I appreciate having to stand around while he was paged and finally got his butt to the shack. Most of the other women smoked so they didn’t mind the breaks.)

Juicing the Beet Pulp into Sample Tubes (This was a rather tough job because the entire process could easily be held up by this last step. If the lady juicing didn’t go fast enough, we couldn’t pass the empty buckets back to the front of the line. Without buckets to put the beets into the process came to a grinding halt.)

The process seemed simple enough but it was far from scientifically accurate. We used the same funnel, gloves, vials and caps over and over again. During our five minutes of training (which was five minutes more then dave got outside), I asked if reusing the same instruments would skew the sugar content results. I was told not to worry. In the end this inaccuracy may have helped the farmers since the sugar crystals were obviously stuck inside the vials and probably gave higher readings. After working for a scientific organization like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it took some getting used to a process so thoroughly inaccurate.

To make matters worse the supervisors both inside and outside provided very little training yet expected you to know what you were doing. In addition to this being unsafe, it was a daily occurrence to have someone screaming at you for messing up something you never knew how to do in the first place. Most people didn’t seem to mind and just let it roll off their backs. I on the other hand have never had a supervisor yell at me before and found the whole thing very demoralizing.

dave and I were rewarded for busting out butts at this job by working an extra week doing all the dirty work nobody else wanted to do. We didn’t mind since we thought this would allow us to work in the factory for the winter. So we scrapped all the dirt off the pilers, hauled all the dirt and mud out from under the scales and help install poles to measure the beet temperature throughout the winter. Yet in the end we didn’t get the factory job. I think it may go back to being in Michigan, too much competition for so few jobs. Couple that with the fact that we weren’t local and didn’t know any of the farmers.

On our last day the beets were still in piles outside. Since I was never inside the factory I can only speculate on what the process is to convert the beets into sugar. I think the beets are cut up and ground into a pulp. The pulp is then spread out and put in a dehydrator where the beet pulp is separated from the sugar crystals. There are a few byproducts to the process; lime, beet pulp, beet molasses and betaine. The lime is used as fertilizer for agricultural fields and is available for free at the factory to farmers and the public. The sugarbeet pulp is the fibrous vegetable matter of the sugarbeet which remains after the sugar has been extracted. It is further dehydrated and pressed into pellets which are sold as animal feed. It takes one ton of sugarbeets to produce 110 pounds of pulp pellets. According to the factory’s website “It has a high energy value, is a good source of protein, contains minerals that are essential for animal health and stimulates milk production. It is also highly digestible and can reduce digestive disturbances.” Beet molasses is the residual liquid left over from the sugar extraction process. It provides an excellent source of carbohydrates for poultry, turkey, and swine feeds. “Betaine functions as an osmo-protector and increases gut elasticity to prevent rupturing during processing. For plants, betaine reduces the freezing point when applied to the leaves of the plant and also functions as an osmo-protector during periods of stress.”

November 15 was our last day of work. dave was lucky enough to get a call from a tree service he applied to. Now he is busting his butt chipping, hauling and splitting wood for a measly $7/hour but it is more than I’m making. Instead I stay home every day working on our resumes, managing our budget spreadsheet, cleaning and hanging out with the dogs. It’s a rough life but some how I’m managing. Since we didn’t get the factory jobs and I don’t even have a job we won’t earn enough to travel next spring and summer. We decided we need to bite the bullet and start applying for federal jobs. We are undecided if we want seasonal or full time jobs so we are applying to both. As we’ve mentioned before we eventually want to get back to Michigan and settle in the Upper Peninsula (UP). dave applied to a seasonal fire job advertised at Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the central UP. Turns out the fire guy there did a two week detail to the Fish and Wildlife office I worked in at Fairbanks this past summer. As a result he knows dave’s previous supervisor. (I love these federal agencies. They are all small enough that everyone seems to know each other.) Long story short it turns out there aren’t any positions open at Seney Refuge but the fire guy there really wants dave to work fire in the UP. He gave dave the low down on what is happening with both the Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service fire programs and opportunities he should pursue.

Now we are back to the waiting game! We’ll keep you posted as we find out more.