Thursday morning and two days until the Earth Skills Symposium. It’s a raw, rainy morning, and the only critters I’ve heard are the rain calls of the blue jays. Except for the beeches and oaks, who sometime keep their leaves through the winter, all the leaves are down. Today we work on finishing final projects and putting the finishing touches on symposium presentations. Last night one of the students got the rim on his ash pack basket. Folding over the uprights was difficult because the ash is so thick – thicker than any basket ever made here. Unless it gets hit by a train, he’ll have it for a hundred years. Another student finished lacing the center of one of her snowshoes. It was a long process filled with intermittent euphoria and frustration, but along the way she learned how to do it, how to see where she had made a mistake, and how to correct it.

I got my hands on an old galvanized water tank yesterday that I’m going to make into a boiler for canoe and snowshoe wood. I’m excited because I’ve been looking for one for over a year.

This morning will be our last wet-weather firelighting exercise of the semester. The last rainy day the students had a roaring blaze going in just a few minutes. We’ll see what they can accomplish this morning.