The Outpost ~ Caretakers At The Helm

Our first month has raced by. It starts the moment the plane takes to the air, the summer crew is gone and the lodge is now “ours”.

This year our food order arrived on the helicopter with us. With so many helping hands the 1600 lbs of supplies were quickly dispersed of in the basement for me to take care of. I like to grocery shop, I think people who love to cook enjoy this first step but putting it all away doesn't fit into this part of the equation.

Soggy (from the rain ) heavy boxes of frozen turkeys, ribs, beef roasts, ground beef, bacon, sausages, whole chickens, chicken breasts and chicken wings, veggies, fruits and maybe a small container or two of ice cream where shoved into freezers wherever there was room. Cases of canned goods put aside to be dealt with later.

This was my first priority...... unpack, organize and make lists of what is where. You know what it's like to put something in the freezer and 3 months go by and of course you have forgotten all about that leftover lasagna you thought would be nice to reheat maybe next week, well imagine 5 full size chest freezers.

Cans of baked beans, kidney beans and black beans sit in rows along with tomato sauce, tomato paste, stewed tomatoes, plum tomatoes, whole tomatoes plus spaghetti sauce, ketchup and tomato juice to complete the tomato family. Totes full of flours, sugars, oats, nuts, dried fruits and chocolate make me want to start baking. A wonderful variety of dry beans, rice and pastas will have me searching for new recipes. Job complete I look around at my “grocery store” for the next 9 months and think “another season has began”.

Keeping a mini grocery store of sorts upstairs cuts down on the trips to the basement every time I need something.

Getting the season's food order involves a lot of handling. After it is unloaded at WCFC office in Vancouver, it gets weighed and marked for destination than loaded onto the first plane. At Masset it's than transferred to the helicopters for the trip to the OP where it's than manhandled into the waggons and lugged up to the lodge. One more set of hands takes it from there into the basement where I am the final one to unpack it.

Now that the food is all put away I can move on to unpacking our own belonging and adding a few items to make the lodge feel more like home. The 20 odd boxes that I had stashed away during out time out were all carried up from the basement. Since I hadn't made lists of what each one contained ( no very smart, I know ) each had to be opened to find what I was looking for. Forgotten that I had left so many clothes, didn't realize I had a set of baking utensils here already, why in the world did I keep that..... were all thoughts that ran through my mind as I cut open box after box. Lists would have helped.

Didn't take us long to move furniture around to suit us ( better for TV watching ) and turn one of the crew bedrooms into our own. Moving of furniture was also involved here to take advantage of the massive picture window, the better to look out and see our deer in the morning or see them looking in.

The kitchen is still a work in progress, even after a month. I like to have everything for cooking and baking right in front of me or as close as I can get when it takes 13 steps just to walk to the fridge in this commercial size kitchen. Mike has already started his game of silently following me to the fridge and than shutting the door behind me once I'm inside. Yep, we're settling in just fine.

While I have been busy inside Mike has been re-familiarizing himself with the generators, taking the work boat out for a spin ( he says test drive to make sure it runs ), learning all about the new reverse osmosis water system, taking inventories of oil and filters which need to be sent up on the barge and searching through the woods close by for a tree or two which he could fall to add to the wood pile.

So a month has come and gone in the blink of an eye and now there are eight.

Till next week,

Heather & Mike