A winters wood

korsi–awesome!! thanks MR & sandwalker.

MR, where do you get all the ash to insulate with? does that work better than dirt?

also, the skill of sleeping sitting up. . . without falling into the fire. i wonder how you learn that?

[quote=“yarrow dreamer, post:21, topic:620”]korsi–awesome!! thanks MR & sandwalker.

MR, where do you get all the ash to insulate with? does that work better than dirt?

also, the skill of sleeping sitting up. . . without falling into the fire. i wonder how you learn that?[/quote]

Where do people normally get ashes? from past fires! pack the ashes. covering fire is not the only use. Ash keeps the fire alive for a very long time. I say it freezes the fire! Also dirt is dirt, but ash is dead fire. I don’t want to make my neat frozen fire “dirty”. Ash is what it will be. OK?

In sandwalkers method one sits, but under a korsi you can take any position you like, well except standing.

Survival instinct? Maybe if you get too close you wake up?

Here’s what I started the winter with for heating my house. That’s about six cords. Right now I have about two rows left in that shed.
We still get a fire going sometimes in the morning to take the chill off.

How many trees does that come out to?

Geez, I don’t know. Depends on how big the trees are that I happen to find standing dead, within easy distance from the side of the road. Sometimes there’s a whole bunch of little ones and sometimes there’s a big one.

30 trees? 50 trees? I make 20 trips in my pickup each year. Sometimes one tree will be enough for a couple of loads. Sometimes it’ll take three or four to make a load. I only cut trees that are already dead. There’s no shortage of them. It would be dumb to cut green ones when there’s so many that are dead, dry and ready to burn. Sometimes I cut wood out of the slash piles the loggers leave behind. Really hard to say how many trees.
It’s a fair bit of work.

Last year a big ponderosa pine near my house got hit by lightning. It was a healthy vigorous tree before that. The next morning after the storm I noticed a crack running from the top, around the trunk all the way to the ground. other than that it appeared to have survived. This spring when the other trees were showing their new growth I noticed this tree had no new growth at all and I could see where bark beetles had attacked it pretty hard. By June the needles were all going orange and the tree was definitely dead.
So yesterday I cut it down and made firewood out of it.
Here’s a picture showing the crack that the lightning strike made.


This is a pretty good sized tree. It was about 80 ft. tall and over two feet thick on the stump. I was able to buck up a lot of wood just out of the limbs. It will be three loads in my pick up so that will be a big chunk of what I need to heat my shop for the winter.

Wow MR,

This korsi thing definitely sounds cool.

I’m taking a week off early october (spring here in the southern hemisphere) to go to see my parents who live out in the sticks. I’m going to spend a lot of the time out testing some of these things !

Good luck anti,
and remember to remember me when you enjoy the warmth, as korsi is one the few joys of my dull and lonely life.
MR