Howdy folks!
My old man is 71 this month and we go camping together from time to time. It's a car camp as he doesn't enjoy hiking and tents so much any more, but that doesn't really stop you getting to some nice remote areas here - his van is all wheel drive, which helps! This trip was in Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico, right near Cloudcroft at an elevation of a bit over 8500 feet or about 2500 meters. Since we were in his van, I took the opportunity to bring a camera and several different axes I wanted to compare
The drive up there from West TX takes a couple hours and I snapped a few shots on the way -
The Organ Mountains
Taken from the same spot in the other direction - you can often see for miles and miles from this spot, but I'm kinda liking the haze.
Mirage on a long, straight road. The road runs for about 30 miles in pretty much a straight line. The mirages blew me away when I first got to the southwest.
White sand, for which White San missile range is named. I didn't go onto the sand this trip, but it's kinda surreal - it looks like snow, but it's 100 degrees or so out. The sand is actually gypsum, and water soluble. Last time I was there I heard an old timer saying that if you dig a hole and fill it with water, hibernating eggs will rehydrate, hatch and you'll have brine shrimp swimming in it.
Almost as soon as we got into Lincoln National Forest, it started raining pretty heavy, so I didn't take any pictures straight out of the car - i was getting tarps and a fire started! We get the monsoon here right in july-august, so everything was pretty soggy already. Most of the largish logs were rotten, so no good - most of the smaller ones were sodden and many of them were rotten as well! There's usually a lot of good wood lying around here - I assume it's been picked dry this summer. This is primarily a pine forest, though there is some oak and juniper too. I wound up finding a log about 5 or 6 feet long and bucked it into sections for splitting. The splitting was mostly done with a Kelly cruiser axe, a 2.5lb double bit head on a 28" haft. More on the axe later. The pine was a pain to split - the wood was still green and there were a number of knots. I wound up feathering some sticks and using cotton wool to take the spark from a ferro rod.
Built a little log cabin to try and dry the wood. Ground was soaked, so I used some of the sodden branches to lift the fire off of it. To my surprise, it kept and burned pretty well - I put a stake in the ground and stacked wood to dry for later.
The wood I was splitting - about 7-8" or so. The log behind it was all punk, like most of the wood of its size I found.
Beautiful woods though!
This is the cruiser axe. It's really great, I love it - handles really well. The other mid-size axe I brought was a Huqvarna forest axe - a really nice axe, but in the larger diameter wet wood the cruiser won hands down. The Husqy would sink and stick. If I had cut the log into smaller pieces, the husqy would have performed better than it did.
I also brought this wee yin. A year or two ago I bought an old hatchet head at an antique mall and wound up hating the thing - sooo I cut it into something smaller. It started out at 21oz, now it's 15oz. I tried to model it after the small belt axes that were around Colonial america. The handle is about 16" and oak. This axe really proved useful - I'd tuck it in the back of my belt and not even notice it, but it chopped pretty well when I did need it - it did all the chopping for pieces 2" or so and down. I used it a lot for separating the mass of clinging fibers whenever the cruiser axe made it through a piece of wood, and it did a lot of barking. Liked it so much I didn't use the pipe hawk (my normal go-to small axe) at all.
Naturally, as soon as I was getting ready to cook dinner the rain kicked up again, heavier than before this time. I hastily put a tarp over the fire at about 6 feet and it kept going until shortly before I went to sleep. I did make the sensible decision to take the teepee tent, since we were in the van and I knew it would be raining. It was definitely convenient being able to toss things in there when it started rather than having to fit a jigsaw. That said, it doesn't feel as nice as sleeping under a tarp or lean-to.
There wasn't a great deal of visible wildlife - I saw rabbit, squirrel and that's it. I did see what I think were black bear bite marks on trees and I heard a lot of coyotes at night pretty close - love listening to coyotes!
Lessons?
Well, pine forests are where I feel most comfortable but this was rather different - we were in an area that's pretty frequently used, and that meant that all the free-to-gather dead wood I've come to associate with pine forests just wasn't there, so I had to work harder than I normally would. Lesson learned.
Learning to light fires in the rain is good wherever you're from. I learned in Scotland, so that's a plus.
You can never have too many axes. But practically speaking, my cruiser splits wet pine better than my husqy.
It was a fun trip!
My old man is 71 this month and we go camping together from time to time. It's a car camp as he doesn't enjoy hiking and tents so much any more, but that doesn't really stop you getting to some nice remote areas here - his van is all wheel drive, which helps! This trip was in Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico, right near Cloudcroft at an elevation of a bit over 8500 feet or about 2500 meters. Since we were in his van, I took the opportunity to bring a camera and several different axes I wanted to compare
The drive up there from West TX takes a couple hours and I snapped a few shots on the way -
The Organ Mountains
Taken from the same spot in the other direction - you can often see for miles and miles from this spot, but I'm kinda liking the haze.
Mirage on a long, straight road. The road runs for about 30 miles in pretty much a straight line. The mirages blew me away when I first got to the southwest.
White sand, for which White San missile range is named. I didn't go onto the sand this trip, but it's kinda surreal - it looks like snow, but it's 100 degrees or so out. The sand is actually gypsum, and water soluble. Last time I was there I heard an old timer saying that if you dig a hole and fill it with water, hibernating eggs will rehydrate, hatch and you'll have brine shrimp swimming in it.
Almost as soon as we got into Lincoln National Forest, it started raining pretty heavy, so I didn't take any pictures straight out of the car - i was getting tarps and a fire started! We get the monsoon here right in july-august, so everything was pretty soggy already. Most of the largish logs were rotten, so no good - most of the smaller ones were sodden and many of them were rotten as well! There's usually a lot of good wood lying around here - I assume it's been picked dry this summer. This is primarily a pine forest, though there is some oak and juniper too. I wound up finding a log about 5 or 6 feet long and bucked it into sections for splitting. The splitting was mostly done with a Kelly cruiser axe, a 2.5lb double bit head on a 28" haft. More on the axe later. The pine was a pain to split - the wood was still green and there were a number of knots. I wound up feathering some sticks and using cotton wool to take the spark from a ferro rod.
Built a little log cabin to try and dry the wood. Ground was soaked, so I used some of the sodden branches to lift the fire off of it. To my surprise, it kept and burned pretty well - I put a stake in the ground and stacked wood to dry for later.
The wood I was splitting - about 7-8" or so. The log behind it was all punk, like most of the wood of its size I found.
Beautiful woods though!
This is the cruiser axe. It's really great, I love it - handles really well. The other mid-size axe I brought was a Huqvarna forest axe - a really nice axe, but in the larger diameter wet wood the cruiser won hands down. The Husqy would sink and stick. If I had cut the log into smaller pieces, the husqy would have performed better than it did.
I also brought this wee yin. A year or two ago I bought an old hatchet head at an antique mall and wound up hating the thing - sooo I cut it into something smaller. It started out at 21oz, now it's 15oz. I tried to model it after the small belt axes that were around Colonial america. The handle is about 16" and oak. This axe really proved useful - I'd tuck it in the back of my belt and not even notice it, but it chopped pretty well when I did need it - it did all the chopping for pieces 2" or so and down. I used it a lot for separating the mass of clinging fibers whenever the cruiser axe made it through a piece of wood, and it did a lot of barking. Liked it so much I didn't use the pipe hawk (my normal go-to small axe) at all.
Naturally, as soon as I was getting ready to cook dinner the rain kicked up again, heavier than before this time. I hastily put a tarp over the fire at about 6 feet and it kept going until shortly before I went to sleep. I did make the sensible decision to take the teepee tent, since we were in the van and I knew it would be raining. It was definitely convenient being able to toss things in there when it started rather than having to fit a jigsaw. That said, it doesn't feel as nice as sleeping under a tarp or lean-to.
There wasn't a great deal of visible wildlife - I saw rabbit, squirrel and that's it. I did see what I think were black bear bite marks on trees and I heard a lot of coyotes at night pretty close - love listening to coyotes!
Lessons?
Well, pine forests are where I feel most comfortable but this was rather different - we were in an area that's pretty frequently used, and that meant that all the free-to-gather dead wood I've come to associate with pine forests just wasn't there, so I had to work harder than I normally would. Lesson learned.
Learning to light fires in the rain is good wherever you're from. I learned in Scotland, so that's a plus.
You can never have too many axes. But practically speaking, my cruiser splits wet pine better than my husqy.
It was a fun trip!
