Chris X Edwards

Winter is here! We have had a very strong start to winter. In mid-November we got some light snow and I was able to get out and test ski my trail. Several of those days, the snow was so thin I could only ski it once. But it did allow me to spot a few problems and make some edits like taking out a few trees that were worse than I thought, etc.

At the end of November however, we got hit with the full winter experience! There were blizzards day after day dumping several feet of snow. Unusually for this time of year, this wasn’t just lake effect snow where some wet snow barely makes the temperature cutoff to be snow. We also got some rather cold temperatures too. I’m not sure we’ve seen temperatures above freezing for two weeks now. And much of that has be extraordinarily cold — the kind of cold that one might expect briefly in February.

A couple of months ago I posted a video of my XC ski trail in the autumn. I said then that I suspected that riding a bike was probably not the quickest way to take a tour. Back then I managed to bike the km in 6:23 at 9.4kph. Naturally I’ve been out skiing on the trail every day and yesterday I managed to do the full loop in 6:00. It’s taken some time to get the snow packed down enough to do that. I’m sure it’s possible to go much faster, but today I thought I’d try getting something demonstrating roughly what this looks like on video. And I did!

Youtube link

The skis I’m using here are ones I picked up at a ski swap sale for about $50. They apparently belonged to "Nora" according to the Sharpie note on them. But these are a slightly older model of Rossi Evos and I’ve found those skis (the older Ukrainian ones) to be incredibly tough and versatile for the challenging wild terrain skiing I do. I have been too lazy to wax my normal collection of skis (soon, soon) and Nora’s old skis have really impressed me.

I’m wearing my chainsaw gloves because after this was shot, I went out with the sled and hauled a bunch of wood in from the forest. That’s how I’ve been compacting the trail. So before anyone tells me how fast they’re skiing, make sure you’ve done all the grooming with your own muscle power first. Compared to ordinary XC skiing, doing it while pulling a weighted sled through deep snow is obviously a much harder sport!

But I am very much enjoying it! It’s extremely nice to have a trail that’s close to my house and that isn’t getting wrecked every day by snowmobiles. Every day I go out, the snow gets better. Very fun!

And I love how in this photo I look like a snow Ewok!

Remember when I took pictures of space from my house? Well here is a cool image from the ISS looking back.

The pink arrow is roughly where I live. When I say I live in the deep dark middle of nowhere, this is what I mean. This is probably the best way to convey how dark our night sky is.

If you like this image, you can watch a whole video of it.

I have a new wood burning stove. If that’s all you need to know, enjoy the photos and have a nice day.

Because this was a huge project that gobbled up months of my life, I’ll note some extra detail for my future self and others who might be interested.

When I lived in Buffalo, I went to a fireplace showroom. A week later the owner himself showed up with my fireplace insert and he set it in my fireplace in about 15 minutes. He then climbed an insanely high ladder and retrofitted my insanely wooden "chimney" with a safe double walled metal tube which he carried up that ladder. In a couple of hours it was done. Cost was pretty reasonable.

Unfortunately, that is not how things work in the deep dark middle of nowhere. I spent months trying to find someone whom I could pay to make this problem go away. At some point I was looking at the website for Pacific Energy, the Canadian fireplace brand I previously bought and was quite satisfied with. Surely there is a way for people in the middle of a forest that drops abundant fuel for one of these devices to obtain one of them. I saw they had a dealer "near" me but that seemed hard to believe because the "town" it was listed in is really not much of anything. On June 9, I called this dealer and finally started making some progress. The guy I talked to was a dealer for Pacific Energy, sort of. He was retired from actually installing stove systems personally, but he had a perfect stove in his inventory that he was happy to sell to a good home and he was also an extremely good knowledge resource for tackling this kind of project. He also was willing and able to deliver this stove and get it in place in my house using a very expensive motorized hand truck that could walk up stairs. I had no way to move this thing alone so it really was a great deal.

Once the project was a go, I had to contend with my incredibly stupid house. Here are some of my stupid house’s stupid problems.

I spent literally months working on the design of this installation. Sure I could have just kludged something together extemporaneously like a dimwitted kid building a tree house, but that — and alcohol — is exactly what made the house I took possession of so awful. I’ve come to understand that rehabilitating awful construction is twice as hard as building high quality from scratch and ten times harder than building a typical American house from scratch.

I started by modeling the relevant part of the house in considerable detail. This included my fancy and accurate geometry node siding.

I modeled the living room with enough detail to get a good understanding of the aesthetics. This included the complex procedural wood texture of the walls and ceiling. It included the windows and sliding glass door. I even created a procedural texture for the awful carpet, but it doesn’t quite do justice to its intrinsic filth. I modeled the stove from images and dimensions in the brochure.

Once the stove was purchased, we were committed. The first major necessary operation before it could be delivered was converting a corner of the room to have a "non-combustible" tile floor.

I was able to use the model to try out different concepts. I can now confirm that dark grout is the correct choice for a hearth installation, and probably any tile work. This concept render is pretty close to the tile I was actually able to obtain and ultimately installed.

I also created very detailed models of every component of the chimney based on the promotional literature. Then I did it again for another company when I found I had no way to buy from the first company. Then I did it again when I actually took delivery of the components and could actually measure the true reality of their geometry.

Not only did I model the existing structure’s highly imperfect geometry and the stove installation’s components, but I also had to carefully plan how I was going to execute the installation. To clear the roof peak by the required two feet (see orange circle below), the chimney cap is 28 feet [8.5 m] from the floor — nearly a full 10m Olympic diving platform off the actual ground. That’s like a tall giraffe standing on a big elephant! I once owned a 24 foot ladder but sold it when I moved; that’s fine since there’s no easy way to even lean a simple long ladder given the steep roof angle. And I was going to need to wrestle heavy chimney pieces up to the top. Could this be done with only an 8 foot step ladder? It turns out yes. But I had to very carefully design the solution.

To make the costs lower and the difficulty higher, the materials I had to work with were all found strewn around the woods. My forensic analysis — done while I painstakingly removed hundreds of rusty nails and screws — determined that the wood that I built the necessary scaffold tower from was once a deck on this house that had collapsed from the weight of snow. See what I mean about bad design precedents? You can also imagine my fear of the current deck collapsing while I worked atop a siege tower supported by it.

The main challenge with the whole project was to get the chimney to clear the eaves, about a 12" offset. One solution would have been to cut a huge chunk in the eaves but that seemed… inelegant. Unlike the intoxicated original builders of this house, I actually have the foresight to imagine it snowing here and I want snow to have the least hassle possible getting off the roof. Therefore I did not block the roof’s fall line with the chimney.

To do this I designed a very precise steel frame that would hold the angled section exactly in the right place. Everything is designed around this. The frame itself is constructed from an old bed frame that was part of a bed left in the room a few meters away.

How does this frame work? As the chimney angles away from the wall, a huge rotational torque is generated which tries to pull the top of the frame directly out from the wall. This is perhaps the most critical design element. The mounting board is held onto the framing by 4 pre-drilled extremely high quality lag bolts that extend a full 3 inches into the framing stud. If that board gets pulled off the wall, the whole wall is coming along. How is the metal frame attached? There are a couple of Phillips head bolts on the face of the mounting board, but those are just bonus. The real holding is done with another 3" lag screw through the top — no pull out force at all, just shear on the bolt’s shaft and the entire wood board’s face holding it back.

This shot of the top frame mount highlights the upper floor’s framing being 3.5 inches south of the lower floor’s. You can just see the true anchoring bolt vertically mounted into the top of the board. That lag screw is aligned with the first floor studs which took precedence to keep the chimney pipe pass-through isolated.

The bottom is a lot less critical but still put together so that it’s not going anywhere. I’m not getting too fussy about the terrible J-channel work; the whole thing is pretty tight under the eave and any serious attention to the siding would be time stolen from figuring out how to replace it entirely.

With the frame in position, the chimney’s geometry is very fixed — with this angled section there can be no vertical or horizontal adjustability. This is why the frame had to be perfect and installed perfectly so that the pipe started the exact distance away from the wall to mate with the section below and to just clear the eaves by the required 2" clearance.

Once the angled section was in place I installed the next technical piece, the mast support. The idea for this is that it ties the rather strong angled frame to the eaves higher up. I wasn’t quite sure what was behind the trim on the eaves and couldn’t really trust the construction to not just disintegrate on me, but it definitely seemed solid enough that I could at least stabilize the top of this mast support.

Here is the mast support installed.

The end goal with the mast support was to provide an additional anchor for strapping the top of the angled section where countering torque could be maximized, and also, of course, to mount the mast (highlighted as bright orange on the wireframe image above). The purpose of the mast is to stabilize the cantilevered part of the chimney that sticks 6 ft above the solid anchoring of the roof.

One thing I discovered during this project is that I love carriage bolts for this kind of connection! I made a custom back plate with two hand cut square holes which allowed me to distribute the clamping forces much better and to not need a second wrench during assembly. Very effective.

In the next photo I am finally installing the mast. Despite designing this tower specifically to perfectly accommodate my 8ft step ladder, I was not sure this arrangement would be something I was comfortable with. But in the end, once I secured the ladder with straps and blocking it was quite stable and not a problem to work on at all. For months I had worried about accessing this height and when I finally had to make it happen, it went exactly to plan. As you can see I’m tethered to the frame and for that reason, this was probably a bit safer than some of the work I did on the frame where there was nothing to tie off to.

Here’s a close up view of the top design.

I had planned to use more bed frame angle iron but I was helping my neighbor solve an engineering problem of extracting a heavy furnace from a crawlspace hole in the floor and when I provided the solution (straps!) they were very relieved. I saw a 4' piece of structural steel strut left over from their project and after admiring it, they were happy to give it to me. When it was mounted to the mast support I could easily hang off it. I calculated the forces on a 6 foot long 8 inch diameter cylinder in a 25_m/s (55mph) wind as being around 185N, or less than a 50_lbf shove. If this thing blows down, I’m pretty sure that won’t be the only damage to the structure. We’ll see I guess.

The cuts in the roof metal are kind of shit, but that roof is corrugated and not easy to bend and I did my best to guide rain water and snow melt back away from the roof edge. We’ll see on that too. It can’t possibly be a worse job than the knuckleheads who installed the thing originally — it hangs over 4" on this side and 0" on the other side.

Here’s a colorful photo of me working on it.

And here is the entire thing completed! This was such a tough install that it was a huge relief to finally get to this point without falling to my death.

If you look closely below and to the right of the chimney base you might notice some of the plastic siding warped by heat. I believe that was where the former owner — a retired fireman FFS — melted it using a grill and some kind of accelerant. Nothing to do with me or this installation!

Here’s what the inside looks like. This simply required a decent amount of work but I didn’t have to risk my life.

Mya helps with the first lighting of the stove.

I actually forgot that the stove needed a couple hours of burn time to set its paint but we dealt with it. Better now than when it’s really cold.

The chimney seems to function! Yay!

Finally the desired effect.

Still lit from the first spark that ignited it, we’ve been running it continuously for a week now and we love it! It is such a massive improvement for making this third world dwelling somewhat habitable. I’m sure we’ve used less than 5% of the daily propane we had been using in the previous weeks. My next project will be to install insulation under the floor so that the unheated crawlspace is not half an inch of OSB below my feet. The house may collapse on me while doing that or I might get electrocuted by the demented amateur wiring down there (I just capped an unterminated snipped wire lying in the sand that was live), but at least I’ve survived not falling to my death from this project. And while I’m still able to swing an ax, I’m now unlikely to freeze to death here.

Winter is coming! And I have been working very hard to prepare for it. One thing I’ve poured a lot of energy into is my own XC ski trail entirely on my property. I now have 1000 meters of pretty good trail that avoids pine trees, difficult inclines, sharp turns, and road crossings — even avoiding my own driveway.

When I first moved here, even walking in this forest was simply not done. First you had to armor up in a full beekeeper suit and then anywhere you stepped you’d have a face full of beech leaves. I did make some early expeditions into this thicket armed with a machete and this forest seemed extremely difficult to move through. Here’s a note on the 1841 survey of my township that says "2nd rate land undulating".

And that is quite true. Notes like this probably saved this forest from clear cutting. The undulations are actually what I call "tree graves". Trees fall and leave big pits where the root ball was and then create long mounds where they decompose and get covered by the forest. But it makes it tough to move through, especially on a bike.

With a lot of work I have managed to upgrade last year’s 250m rough ski trail into a pretty good loop that goes all over the property. I have also cleared out tons of small beech trees — well over a thousand — that were choking the forest. Well, they thought they were the forest but I disagreed.

Since we’re having some very nice weather and the trees are putting on their fall colors I thought I’d make a video of my trail for others to check out.

Youtube link

This is so rough for biking that I suspect I could run this route on foot quicker — I’m sure my brother could. (This is pretty close to 1km in 6:23 or 9.4kph; younger me has run a half marathon at 15.8kph.) Hopefully I’ll post another video once the snow comes demonstrating the truly quickest way to get through this forest!

UPDATE - 2025-12-08

Here is the winter version. And yes, skiing is quicker!

In the extremely prescient song Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Drugs, the Austin Lounge Lizards ask,

They then sardonically posit the answer is the titular antagonist of the song. (Seriously, go have a listen to this 1996 song which does a freakishly good job of predicting our current zeitgeist. Or you can read the lyrics.)

I’m often reminded of that song these days because the answer to that second question is, for me in our swamp, something almost as bad as fascists: deer flies. I’ve mentioned the insane mosquito situation (which has been better this year) and the sinister black flies. This year they have been bad at times, but now we have managed to keep those bugs out of the house, I think it’s been the deer flies that have been the most maddening.

Here is one I tamed today — her name is "lefty".

While usually not as gory as the rivulets of blood caused by black fly bites, deer fly bites are nasty and leave cuts and inflammation. But what really can drive someone insane is their hunting behavior: they go for the back of the head. This is why if I wear a backwards baseball hat, they are pretty much neutralized. Who would have thought that fashion trend could actually be very practical?

If, however, I forget to wear my backwards hat, I’m usually about halfway through watching the dog take a dump when I hear them and feel them pecking on the top of my skull. Ironically I’ve thought that the most impractical hat of all time, the yarmulke, would actually not be nearly so absurd in our context. That’s how weird this insect phenomenon is.

All this is to impress on you how very maddening these flies have been to me. Clearly they’ve pushed my limits of mental composure. I call these little fuckers, well, little fuckers for one. And also "Pig-Pen flies". This is because I have had extraordinary experiences where I’ve been rollerskiing or biking and a cloud of them form around my head. I can look down and see this cloud in my shadow like the Pig-Pen character of Peanuts. It’s crazy.

But what’s really crazy, is I can not see them directly! I also call them "gaslight flies" because they swarm you but you only hear them and feel their attacks. If you turn your head to look at them, they will move with your head as fast as you can turn it to remain out of sight. It’s incredible. Sometimes I’ll go to a reflective surface like a window or my bike mirror just to see them. Or you can back up to a building and then look straight up.

It’s difficult to say what exact species this is but I suspect it’s Chrysops excitans or something very similar. Probably it is many similar species throughout the summer.

Flies from this family, Tabanidae (horse flies), are apparently some of the fastest insects known with speeds up to 145kph. What I know first hand is that they are quite fast. Above 20kph, you can start to lose them. But below that the Pig-Pen swarm can follow you for many kilometers. Below about 15kph, they can land and be very annoying.

I have done experiments with a hard hat where I put a sticky fly sheet on the back. With only that I’ve caught quite a few. The internet seems to believe that they are attracted to blue (though more scholarly work seems to be more likely to mention "polarized light"). I did a little experiment making a pair of blue animal ear shapes on my hard hat and putting the sticky sheet over that. Just biking to the mail box (maybe 4 minutes of very moderate biking) I got two that I never saw or heard.

Ultimately you can defend against these simply with a hat and if they really drive you crazy, you can go on the offensive. But they are so incredibly maddening that they give the other deeply nasty bugs of our forest some real competition in the world’s most awful animal contest.