Xmas Come And Gone.

      I've been too busy or too lazy to post for a couple weeks you may have noticed. Most everything is back in order after that last storm we had. I'm trying hard not to write about my power system again, too many power system related posts lately so I'm not going to carry on about it now.
I'm sure it gets old to some out there quickly.

Been nice mild days right up until the 25th.

   The creeks have gone down to their seasonal normal and the salmon have moved up the channel to spawn in the creek out front. There wasn't a lot of them, maybe a half dozen or so out there every day.  Several eagles lurked about in the trees overhead keeping and eye on the run, and the spawned out fish eventually disappear one by one.

   The little guest cabins been busy over the holidays, and booked right up until next year sometime.

Jean Wu and her outfit stayed over Christmas. We got a fire going for them the first night over at the big fire pit, it was a crisp, clear night and stars filled the sky. They hiked all around and back and forth to the hot spring. I pointed out the salmon in the creek out front and they were all much impressed. I took the guys in for a tour of my man cave. Young Vincent stood looking up at my drums in there, all shiny and chrome, with big speakers on either side, and colored spot-lights from above. "Coool" he said slowly, nodding his little head, and you could just tell what he was thinking.

 And on the final night it snowed a  little bit for them, just to complete their holiday in the mountains.

Come back soon folks!

   I recall I spent most of Christmas Day in the man cave working on my pickup, because I was tired of posting about my power system. I crawled under the lodge to pull some wires around and get the cabin on another circuit, and a few projects around, and..., and I built a new intake screen for the power system.! I finally managed to get hold of most of what I needed to replace the intake screen that got blown out in the storm. I had patched the pipe up there together and running the intake wide open so I was keen to get a screen on the end once more before the cold weather hit or the creek came up again.

The fabricated screen frame and held together with stainless wire.

This is not my normal screen design, I'm trying out some new mesh, made from plastic rather than the metal type I have always used in the past. That worked out to 2000 square inches of screening area to feed an 8 inch pipe 250-300 gallons a minute. It is sure nicer to work with and held on there with about 200 little zip-ties. The old metal screen was hard to cut, and of course little poky ends everywhere and I always got all scratched up building it, scratched up and poked hiking into the dam with it, then poking holes in my rubber gloves installing it, pretty much negating any advantage to bringing rubber gloves along.

I packed my new user friendly screen up the mountain and hiked it into the intake dam.

I snapped this shot and got a long handled pole onto each end on the lifting hooks, and dropped it in the water then worked it onto the end of the penstock. There is red flagging tied onto the lifting hooks to make them easier to find when taking it off. I'm slowly learning these little tricks to make my miserable life a little easier. There is cold weather happening in the next bit, it will be interesting to see how the plastic mesh deals with the frazzle ice. But that's all I'm going to say about that.