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de-winterizing, 2025
Saturday, March 29 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Some days ago, temperatures were predicted to reach 80 degrees in the Hudson Valley today. Subsequently the forecast was changed and temperatures were only expected to read 70, but that's still pretty good. I figured it would also be warm at the cabin, maybe reaching into the 50s or so, so the plan today was to drive there with the dogs and spend the night. (Gretchen wouldn't be coming because she had something she had to do in Hudson on Sunday.) But when I woke up this morning, I felt pretty low-energy; I'd taken my first diphenhydramine in nearly a week and my body wasn't used to it. So I made myself a french press of coffee and played Spelling Bee in front of a roaring cardboard fire with Gretchen in the living room (the dogs were still in bed). Eventually, though, I started loaded up the Forester, filling it with lots of my paintings that I'd brought back from Virginia. I also rolled up the old living room rug and tied it to the roof. (It had spent the winter being rained and snowed upon to wash away the dog urine from multiple hot spots. Fortunately Charlotte doesn't seem to piss on indoor carpets any more.)
After loading up the dogs and getting something interesting on YouTube to play through the entertainment system, I began my drive, taking the "scenic route" through Cairo and Middleburgh. As I often do, I stopped for provisions at the Cairo Hannaford, where I got bread, lettuce, Grey Poupon mustard, tofu, margarita mix, orange juice, sourdough bread, some sort of multigrain bread, pasta, Rao's marinara sauce, and twelve pack of boozy Atomic Torpedo IPA. As I was checking out, the cashier asked how I was and I volunteered that I was heading to the Adirondacks to start up my cabin for the season. "You have a cabin?" she asked, saying it like someone would say, "You have a private jet?" I explained how I had to turn on the water and get it going again and that it was a "whole thing." "But it's worth it!" she replied. I didn't want to make her any more jealous, so I didn't talk about the lake or the waterfall or the amazing cliffs.
The drive was fairly non-eventful, though Charlotte insisted on doing most of the ride crammed next to Neville in the front passenger seat, since two of my bigger paintings were occupying the entire foot well of the back seat (a place she likes to nestle instead of on the seat for some reason). It was cloudy and occasionally drizzling for most of the drive, though the carpet on the roof never got particularly wet for some reason. Temperatures started out in the 40s and then fell into the teens as I crossed the highlands south of Middleburgh and then in the town of Charleston. I didn't see any snow until I got to the neighborhood of West Bush at the foot of the Adirondack escarpment, and then it was only in a few remnants along the side of the road. But when I turned onto Woodworth Lake Road, there were still big piles of snow on either side of that and a persistent snow pack amongst the trees in the visible part of the adjacent woods. Fortunately, the snow hump at the entrance to our driveway was only an inch or two deep, and there was no snow on the driveway until I was nearly at the cabin. But the patch I encountered there was a good six inches deep, and I had to drive through it to put the Forester close enough to the generator to jump start it (its battery and others parallel to it were long dead).
After getting a fire started in the woodstove, I turned my attention to the generator. Once it was started, I used one of my trickle chargers to prime the cabin's battery. But it was down around 30 volts, and that one couldn't make any headway. So I had to use another trickle charger. That one kept clicking a relay due to the low voltages it had to work against, but it got enough into it that I could use the other trickle charger, which quickly put enough into the battery to get it to around 42 volts, at which point I could switch to conventional charging using the SolArk inverter mediating power from the generator.
I then turned my attention to putting water back in the first floor hydronic loop so I could use the boiler to supplement heat coming from the woodstove and minisplits. It took a few tries with connecting various hoses and switching valves to blow all the air out of that loop, but once I did, that loop could begin doing its heating. But it's very slow and the cabin actually heats fastest if one gets a roaring fire in the woodstove. I couldn't quite achieve that due to moisture in the wood I was using, but by the end of the evening I'd raised the cabin temperature from 40 degrees to 62 degrees.
At some point before sunset I took Charlotte for a walk (Neville seemed to come too, but he must've been very slow, as I never actually saw him on the walk and he returned to the cabin afrer we got back.) I took the Mossy Rock Trail down to the lake, and there was little snow in my way on that route. The lake itself was still almost entirely frozen and about as high as I've ever seen it. But my stone "ice wall" seemed intact and to be creating a thin line in the ice exactly where I wanted it. The dock, though, seemed to have been dragged an additional half inch or so out into the lake and to have dropped a little in the process, creating a slight step at the stone abutment it runs from.
Charlotte and I walked along the lakeshore to the outflow dams, where I saw that beavers had added numerous sticks to both the outflow dam and the dam just below it, one they'd built a couple years ago and which I had further improved with stones. The sticks they'd used had all been entirely stripped of bark, which they would've eaten.
From there, I headed back to the cabin through the trail that has a switchback up through the cliffs. Before I got to those cliffs, though, I had to walk across a lingering expanse of deep snow. In some places it was deeper than my knee-high rubber boots.
There had been a couple blowdowns among the trees along the north edge of our cabin's building site, likely reflecting the weakness of trees that had grown up among other trees and are now too weak to survive when fully exposed on their south side. To open up the trail to the lake, I used the small electric chainsaw to cut up one of the fallen trees.
Later I experimentally upgraded the ESP8266 board that monitors outdoor temperatures from the shelter of the screened-in porch. I had a bunch of advancements I'd developed over the winter, including a new encryption scheme for the authentication secret, support for local FRAM data logging and a real-time clock, and a whole new system for interrogating the device for information. It took a little tinkering to get all the code working correctly on that device, but in so doing, I had a good basis for upgrading the other ESP8266s.
Later I took a nice hot bath, though was a little distressed to see that the water I'd been bathing in was as dark as tea, evidently from sediments related to the restarting of the plumbing system.
The way the cabin looked this evening. Note the tracks made by the Forester to get it near the generator. Click to enlarge.
The frozen lake from our dock. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte near the tree dock this evening. Click to enlarge.
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