The Ice Harvest at Hanford Mills is coming up!

The Hanford Mills Museum is a great living history museum in East Meridith, NY.  It has preserved a family's Home, Farm, General Store, Post office, and Water Powered Sawmill, Grist Mill, and Woodworking shop.

Every February they have the Ice Harvest.  Blacksmith friends and I staff the Blacksmith Shop during the event.  This year we will be making hinges, and working on axes.

Hundreds of visitors help cut ice blocks and haul them out of the water.  Then wooden work sleds are used to haul them to the Ice House.   They are stored in the Ice House for use in the summer. 

The ice is used all summer.  One use is with the Children's Summer day camp.  They use the ice and the Ice Cream Churn to make gallon after gallon of sweet ice cream.  Pretty good use of that ice on a hot summer's day!

So, if you want to have fun and experience an ice harvest, go to Hanford Mills Feb. 6th after 10 am.

Two Forged Axes

Traditional axes made before the 20th century were generally forged of wrought iron with a steel cutting bit welded in place.

The Trade Axe is an even older style, but was make in Europe for trade in North and South America until after WWII.

There were a wide variety of axe styles used at the time of the American Revolutionary War.  George G. Neumann documents a lot of these in "Swords & Blades of the American Revolution".

More ADK fishing trip pictures.

My last fishing trip took me to the Aldrich Pond Wilderness in the Adirondacks.

The season road was very quiet.

View of the site of the 1913 Logging dam.

What remains of the Aldrich Pond log catchment.

It would have been nice fishing without the mosquitos and black flies.

Further down the river.

The Streeter Lake State Lean-to got a new coat of paint in 2014.  Pretty fancy!

I didn't catch anything, although a lot of trout were rising.  Joshua did, and was king of the Sunfish!

He even caught an empty clam shell.  Not everyone can do that!

 It was a good trip and good scenery even if we didn't catch any trout.

Opening Camp for the Summer.

There are always chores to do at camp.  I've had some help catching up with some of them.

 Mowing the weeds to encourage the grass and discourage the ragweed.

Cleaning up the Chamber Cookstove.  Three burners, bean pot, griddle, and broiler.

I also made a little time to go fishing on the Little T and the Aldrich Pond, remains of the logging catch basin built before WWI.

 There is less than 2 feet of water in the pond now.

The wrought iron log boom anchors are still solid in the rock.  There are two pair of boom anchors spiked into the granite.

A friend and I fished after some chores.

 The Mighty Fisherman and his catch.

Spring comes late in the Adirondacks.

Camp.  Lots of snow for late March.

Almost 4 feet in the driveway.

1931 cabin.

New outhouse in 2015.  The sign is from the 1950's, from my Great-Grandfather's lumberyard business.

He provided topographical survey information for this 1915 map.  He was the Timber Boss of the logging project that created Aldrich Pond.  The wooden dam is gone, and the now pond long gone too.

Lake Effect Snow of 2015

Up here in the North Country we get Lake Effect Snow.  A local meteorologist invented the term for the massive snowfall created by cold air going over the warm waters of Lake Ontario.  We had 6 days of snow, both preceded and followed by temperatures below zero!

The storm came in daily waves, with digging out every day.

 I gave up on clearing the shop doors until the storm stops.  That is a 3 foot drift in front of the door.

 Even when it stopped snowing the blowing and drifting snow kept driving exciting!

 This is what my Mom's car looked like AFTER 5 hours of snowblowing and shoveling.  It was a bump in the snow before that.

We eventually got it cleared off.  Now we are getting more snow, with a temperature drop expected to -15!

Steam Engine 1095 Canada Pacific, Kingston On.

In the heart of the downtown Kingston, On. waterfront park is Engine 1095.  It is a daily tourist attraction, and is clearly well cared for by the city.

 Built in 1913, the various guard rails, hand hold, equipment hooks, and other small hardware pieces were clearly still hand forged in the Canadian Locomotive Company shop.

One of over 500 of this model built by the Canadian Locomotive Company, it is nice to see the old girl so well preserved.  Only a tiny percentage of Steam locomotives have survived, and the largest and most common seem to have survived the least.