We Got the Call | Picking up Road Kill Moose

okay so a while back we signed up for something that they do in Alaska it's called the roadkill list basically you contact the Alaska State Troopers and you're on the list if a moose gets hit by a car or a train or dies you can kind of come out and you can take the moose and you get all the meat and yada yada so a few seconds ago we got the call so we have to get the truck started up I've already got the trailer hooked up and basically our plan is to go out there and they want you there as fast as possible and you need to get that moose out of there our plan is to winch the moose onto the trailer as is whole and just get it out of there as fast as we can and yeah that's what we got going on I'm getting all the snow knocked off the truck and we're heading out [Music] okay so the way these things work is you're never ready for it you kinda just gotta be as worried as you can all I know is this thing I think was hit by the train so it's on the railroad tracks probably about 15 minutes from here it's actually really close to where our second property is and we have a come-along in the back of the truck and that's a 2,000 pound come along so I think we could either use to come along and just try to winch it onto our trailer manually or we can load up the 6x6 the four-wheeler or the six wheeler put that in the trailer and then we can use the six wheeler to winch it under the trailer and then one of us can just drive the six wheeler home it's about ten mile drive but I don't think it should be too bad so I think I said let me do I'm gonna pull this trailer out I'm gonna get the plow disconnected from the six wheeler load the six wheeler on the trailer that way we can bring the six wheeler with us to go pick up the moose and I can just use a winch on the six wheeler which is a forty five hundred pound winch and we could easily just winch it onto the trailer that way so I'm gonna pull the truck forward see if we get the six we load it up Boban it knock it off so we just got a bunch of snow the other day but I think the only thing I have to do on the players's get it fired up and get the snow off it and get the winch disconnected [Music] that's one of the coolest things about this winch is it takes about ten seconds with one hand to get it disconnected so I'm just gonna pull our winch in and then I've got about probably got about 60 or 70 feet of straps along with our okay how long our winch cable is just a standard winch cable so I don't know 100 feet maybe so I'm gonna clear the snow off the trailer and we'll get the players loaded up [Music] hey we got more straps in the truck we've got to come along just in case got the players on I'm gonna throw my bibs on get some gloves I think we're pretty much ready to hit the road okay so we are on the road I think it's been how long has it been since you got the call and we have about 50 minutes to go so we'll see what it's like when we get there we're super excited and this is a now what we're doing today yeah we had plans but we knew with this road kill list do you want that moose when they call you you basically gotta jump you're doing yeah you got to come get in we've been waiting for this I've been too long what four months are down or months you've been on the list and the moose have been out a lot this month yeah when you see them left and right on the roads so we're hoping we were hoping but we never know yep we also got lucky today because it's only 26 degrees another way we got lucky is it is a little before two o'clock in the afternoon so we got plenty of time to go get this thing while the sun's still out and yeah our main goal is just to get down there and get this thing on the trailer okay it's 210 in the afternoon and we are pulling up on the crime scene if you want to call it back anyways we're pulling up on where the dead moose is and don't see anything so far it's the railroad tracks are right next to us and it's supposed to be at where this road crosses the railroad tracks so pulling up on that we'll see if we can find us this did you say did they say got it back yeah I just assume we don't know if we got hit by a train or not so we'll see sometimes it's not all the meat obviously a salvage boat but it's still afraid free moose yep just takes a lot of hard work and some gas money down here but we'll see what happens so I don't see anything yet I don't see any it doesn't look like the troopers grab yours that's like well there it is okay so I see the moves and it's actually on a crane so we just got to the spot and there are some gentlemen out here that are actually able to load it up onto our trailer we brought our side-by-side so we're going to figure out things with that or know if we're driving that back or just coming back to get it but this is gonna make the process a lot easier for us okay we got the moose loaded up we need to get out of the way because the railroad crew is here and they're out here doing their job so ariel is gonna be driving the truck I'm gonna be driving the players which we didn't actually need to bring but it's good to be prepared and we're gonna get these guys way and then we'll stop and we're gonna talk a little bit more about what we got going on okay so we are headed out super cool they were able to do that for us so we don't have a winch on our truck I think this was kind of best case scenario because we are so close by to where the moose got hit it also is a bull it's a younger bull and it just got its back leg so it's not totally totally damaged by all so we're really really really thankful and excited for this and we also when you do the road Cutlass you go in as a group so we went in with our neighbors and we're gonna be sharing this it's awesome food for us food for them too and we just still are in the midst of figuring this all out and we're gonna figure out what we're doing hey guys this is our moose and this is a bull moose and they've shedded their antlers so there's that's why there's no antlers on it and the nitty-gritty is I got hit by the train and the guys there said it looks like it just all that happened to it was it broke its leg the bottom portion of it you could tell it was broken and they actually had to shoot this moose they shot it right before we got there they said it was still alive so that was good they already did that for us and like I said that was that was awesome having them out there with that crane because these things weigh a lot so now all we have to do is we're about 10 miles from our house Aeros gonna be driving the truck and I'll be on the Polaris and then we'll get home and then we'll go from there I'm glad that's happened on a day that not that many people are out because we're going real slow go into our house for about 30 35 miles an hour our old players we could go a lot faster but that's the drawback of this one and honestly an upside because it's an awesome machine so we're just chugging along pretty exciting now and you know you didn't want to touch that it is a lot of excitement because we joined this roadkill list and we were just really you know you never know you never know when you're gonna get caught you never know if you're gonna get the call at all maybe you'll miss it you know maybe your phone's off and that's it you got to call and either you have to pass or you can go for it and I wanted to just say that it is you know sad - I know we're very excited about it and seem excited about it but it's purely just because so much is going to come from this animal for us and it means a lot to people who live here in Alaska that they have this system and this program for the roadkill list for the residents so again it is sad that this animal passed away but we're just really really appreciative for what we get in-game and I think we've only been about maybe a quarter of the way so we've got a little more to go so we made it to our Road and we talked to our neighbors and what we're gonna be doing is actually processing it at their place that's a little more appropriate for it for the hand ours and we're gonna be aging the meat so we were going to pick back up with you guys a little bit down the road when we actually get to that point and we'll let you know how things are going so it's been two days since we got our roadkill moose and we have the head from the moose in here with the chickens and they're going to town on it and kind of picking away what they want we have the meat hanging up and we're probably gonna let that hang for we're not really sure but probably about a week or so before we actually start packaging it up the organs we've been given to the dogs so they're loving that we're really excited about that so it's again just really really exciting to have so much meat so upon further inspection with the moose we believe it was about a two year old bull moose so pretty young and we believe it was about maybe like 700 800 pounds so still a lot of meat but it's definitely not you know a sixteen hundred pound full-grown bull moose but we're really happy to have a lot of moose meat and we got really lucky with it when we were processing it we noticed from the outside picked up that it didn't really look like it had been damaged very bad it had hurt its right lower leg where there's not really a lot of meat and when we processed it in the pelvis area it looks like it did get hit in its back and there were some broken bones but really for the most part all the meat was you know salvageable so we didn't lose any which is really exciting for us again because it got hit by a train and we're a little concerned that it may not be very useful but it was thankfully yeah and on the roadkill list you don't know what you're gonna get and if you're on that list and you say I'm gonna do it with that moose you have to deal with it no matter what that moose looks like so we got really lucky we were prepared to pull it out of a ditch if we had to luckily it was on a crane it was loaded right into the trailer oh it was an awesome situation and since we're already out and about today we kind of wanted to go over a few things with you guys and just give you some updates on what's been going on around our cabin so our chickens are doing great they made it through winter really well this is our first time with having them here in Alaska and I think we got down to negative 30 in the winter and our chickens are an uninsulated unheated coop and they did fine but I will say one thing that we should have foreseen was our males have large combs and they're unfortunately too big for those temperatures so they did suffer severe frostbite and what's happened is they're kind of lost that tissue and they're healed so from here forward we're gonna be trying to keep chickens like this girl I don't know if you can see her but she's got a nice peak comb I think it's called and we're gonna keep the ones with the smaller straight combs but the one rooster that did get frostbite had a really big strike comb so we're gonna try to breed them and keep the comb types that work best for our climate we did try to help them out as much as we could on the really cold nights we'd come out here and rub Vaseline on the chickens with the bigger combs and what do you think did that seem to help at all I think it did help to some extent and the coop we have is supposed to have really good valuation so I think that helped but we found that the moisture was still pretty high in there so that may have been contributing to it as well but yeah I mean they they made it through and we've been getting some really warm temperatures I think it's like almost 30 degrees above zero Fahrenheit today so the chickens are they're loving life now they're awesome they're out and about every day they prefer you know above zero degrees and we begin lots of eggs with the light hours where we're starting to get quite a bit every day which is super exciting yeah we got twelve eggs yesterday which was awesome and I think it's about halfway through the day today and we already have about five or six eggs so we're doing good on that end so yesterday we were doing some more snow removal for the second time this week I'm getting hammered with snow here I think we earlier this week got not quite a foot but pretty close and then plowed all that and a few days later we got another 8 or 9 inches and we just finished plowing that it actually hasn't been that bad this year we've only had to bring out the plow and the snow blower maybe five times total and but we do have quite a bit of snow on the ground and piles are starting to go a lot bigger where we're plowing but so far so good we've had no problems plowing our snow and we're able to keep our area clear which is a big thing for us this year because we're hoping when spring comes around we won't have as much snow you know on our property where we actually use the property melting and creating all that mud for us like we had last year in the springtime on that note we are going to show you guys at the high tunnel and how that's looking we've been keeping the area around it clear so it doesn't get too much snow and that was pretty easy this year with the snow rake and the snow blower so in just a moment we're gonna head over there and I can show you guys inside and one more thing with the moose meat like I said we have it hanging so we're gonna age it for probably about a week or so we're not exactly sure but we will do a video on that not in this video but we'll be processing that and probably grinding it and putting away roasts and stuff like that so stay tuned for that video but let's head over to the house the other day I was able to get in here by putting some hot water down at the bottom because I don't really have to do this but I wanted to show you guys what it looks like in here the plan this year was going to be to start our seeds out here and we were going to run lights and have some sort of heat in here whether it be a wood stove or even like a rock or a stove but we didn't get to that and it also is frozen and it's just not good timing so I'm not sure if that's something we're going to do in the future it's still something you know in the back of your mind but right now we already have our seed started inside the cabin and when things warm up we will be hardening them off out here and it's really cool inside here when I got in here the other day none of the ground looks frozen or has frost on it so it's really cool in there we're gonna be squeezing through in here guy said it looks like smells really cool it smells like just earth like decomposing material this is what it looks like it's a hot mess in here but soon it'll be a garden again so really exciting for that and that whole area in the back was where we talked about maybe putting some sort of heating in and just you know putting up like a sheet so we could heat some plants or see things over back there we're not trying to heat the whole high tunnel or anything like that and this structure if you remember watching us building it it has held up really well this winter really really happy about it say Pauley should last us a few years I hope you know I know the woods not gonna last forever but the top rail which is the you know the ribs and pretty much the frame of this should last indefinitely it's incredibly strong we had no issues with wind or with snow loads I just came out here you know after one or two storms and made sure there wasn't too much snow on the top because eventually if it has too much on the sides it could definitely collapse it if we're not careful of that we're gonna head inside and check out where we are starting our seeds this year or where we've started them already before we head inside and check out the seeds we need some food so we're gonna go down the root cellar we're gonna bring you with us and show you how things are doing down there we're down in the cellar like we mentioned earlier it's about thirty degrees today the root cellar right now it's sitting at twenty nine point one degrees and you may think that that's below freezing and stuff would freeze but actually things will not freeze down here in that temperature we've had this root cellar a couple months back where we went through a long period well we think it was long about a month of the negatives where the high was about negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit and the root cellar the lowest stick out was 28 degrees and nothing froze the only thing we've had a couple problems with is we got a little bit of moisture on a few of our potatoes and when the potatoes got the moisture on it that froze and kind of softened up the potatoes we didn't lose any of the potatoes we were actually still able to eat them we just kind of sorted them out ate those ones first so we're doing good over there we still got quite a bit of potatoes left the ones over on this side are the ones we're gonna be trying to save for seed for next year and as far as canned food I mean we've ran out of a few of our favorites like cowboy candy zucchini bread applesauce and we're getting low on our sauerkraut but we're doing really good we still have a ton of carrots a lot of beets and yeah so far so good everything's still working down here we haven't gone a full year with the root cellar but we feel like we've made it through the hardest times that this thing is gonna face so we're not going to make any changes of this thing yet but in the future we might we still got to make it through this first year so I'm just gonna grab a few things and we're going to head up and check out the seeds this is what our seed setup looks like inside this is what we did last year we have two shelves and we have these lights to provide enough light for the seedlings since we just don't have enough daylight yet and we have a whole bunch of stuff started I've got leeks shallots onions started we have rosemary some of our herbs peppers and celery and artichokes and lemongrass and then we have eggplant over by the wood stove this year we've been trying to use the wood stove for our heat rather than having to run the heat mat and that has seemed to work very well we do have to run our small generator on days that we don't get enough solar power but I can't complain because we are just fortunate to have a situation like this that we can set them up and we are more than ecstatic for another gardening year you know it's early now and everything's so small but soon it'll be big and beautiful out in the garden in the summer we're gonna end today's video with some snow clips that Eric and I took over the last few days and it looks like we may even be doing some snow removal coming up soon because it is snowing again so we will see you guys next time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 390,387

Rating: 4.9342456 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, cabin life, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, winter in alaska, off grid in alaska, solar system alaska, living in a tiny house, winter cabin living, day in the life off grid, winter cabin snow storm, first snow at cabin, harvest moose, moose alaska, road kill moose alaska, self reliant alaska, snow storm at cabin, greenhouse alaska, keeping chickens cold climates, chickens alaska, snow removal at cabin

Id: W0tjTF7kT00

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020