News Update From Ft. McPherson - Friday September 7th, 2001

The log house with the blue front is the house we are renting for this winter in Ft. McPherson. Right now we are staying in the yellow house beside it while the Hanthorns are away on holidays, and we are slowly getting moved in. Not much is available for renting here right now. Since this house has a wood stove, it will save us buying heating oil, which could run about $5,000 for the winter. The ground here is permafrost, which means that it is frozen year round, and only thaws out about two feet down in the summer. Therefore, no water or sewer lines can be put into the ground. A truck brings water to the houses and fills up a tank inside the house. Another truck comes and pumps out the sewer tank which is usually just under the floor and has a heating element in it to prevent it from freezing up. This house has no water system. We are rigging up a 150 gallon tank for water, inside the bathroom. We will just use a 'Honey Bucket' system in the bathroom and a barrel for drain water. The water that the truck brings comes from a lake just beside the town and is not safe for drinking. We have to haul our drinking water from James Creek, which is over 40 miles from here, out in the mountains. Bottle water can be bought for $7.00 a jug, of about 5 gallons. The house does have electricity. The town has it's own generating plant for electricity. Located nearly 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, needless to say, everything is quite expensive, and many things are unavailable. The two light brown sheds we built at Sunchild to move our things in, are beside the house where we had to unload them. The big loader we used to unload them kept getting stuck, so we couldn't get the sheds back behind the house where we wanted them. The ground is very soft. Because of the ice underneath, the water can't sink into the ground, so it is always wet and soggy on top. It is very different for us being right in town with houses right beside us! Something we are having to adjust to. We have lots of company throughout the day. It's nice being able to get our mail every day. At Sunchild we could only get our mail when we went into Rocky, about once a week.