Here’s half of next year’s heat. It’s 60 feet long, 4.5 feet high (average), and 15″ deep or so, and that pencils out to 2.5 cord, or about half of what I’ll need next winter. It looks like a lot of wood, but last year we started burning in September and we burned a long time. We even had a few little fires into June of this year. It gets cold on this mountainside.

Also some of this is junk wood. I got a few lengths of cottonwood from a neighbor, which splits easily but burns indifferently and leaves a ton of ash. I also blocked up a fallen birch behind the treehouse, and I can’t use much of that. I should learn not to burn birch around here unless I felled it myself, 20 minutes ago. It rots fast. I dropped one piece on the railroad-tie stairs leading down to  the garden and it burst like an egg. When it dries, the birch will be okay. It will burn fast and hot, like cardboard.

But a lot of this is good wood. The middle section is mostly that lodgepole pine I dropped this spring, and there’s lots of fir and tamarack from around the property. If I can ever get my trailer hitch figured out I’d like to head up into the hills this summer and bring some more down. Oh well, I’ll do that when I have time. (Joke. Funny. Laugh.)

More than heat, more even than security, this woodpile is my entertainment. Some people get their thrills from video games or cooking or watching the idiot box. For me, this is my fun and games. Nothing beats a good sharp chain saw sinking down through a log, or the satisfaction of a big hulking block of wood jumping in half under my splitting maul. It’s hard to beat the feeling of security I feel watching my firewood dry out and crack in the summer sun, or smell it settle into the dry woodshed in the fall. And there’s just no better feeling than to go out to hang laundry and find that one third of your Great Wall of Firewood has fallen over.

That happened last Saturday. Cool, huh? I’m still learning.

(I’m posting today because I’ll be out on Friday. Jess and I are taking the kids to the coast.)