Summer Activities and Bowdrill Ironies.

We spent most of yesterday putting together a couple of bow drill sets for Braden and Caib, and avoiding house work for me. Well, what do you do with an eleven year old and a twelve year old boy after the cows are on the mountain, the sheep are all on the mountain and the farming has to be done with supervision in the evenings after Dad gets home from work. Oh sure, they have chores to do and you'd think they were the most strenuous chores on the place with the way they carry on about them and take two to three hours to get the ten minute chores done.

So, I ask what do you do? Well, you load all the kids up into the pick-up and head to the mountains where you can find some pretty decent size Sagebrush.

You hand a saw to the ambitious kids and have them saw the brush into manageable pieces and load them into the pick-up



While the less ambitious kid plays with the dog.
(OK He's definately not less ambitious, he just couldn't handle a saw)


You head home and saw the wood into these nice little fire boards
All done by hand.

Then you have the boys whittle some smaller sage branches into these spindles

then you run down the street to the irrigation canal where you can find some Willow or River Birch that will work as bows.

Then you run down to Big Rocks where some unidentified rancher has, in the long past, drug off a dead cow and left it amidst the brush and...well...big rocks; and find a couple of ankle bones from that LONG dead cow.

and Voila a bow drill set.

Caib has been determined to get a fire and has spent quite a few hours out trying his hardest to get one.

He's even made quite a bit of smoke. I've got to take Braden out to find another stick for a spindle his isn't quite straight enough.

The irony comes from the fact that, there we sat most of yesterday evening trying our darnedest to get a fire burning(side note: I used to work for one of those outdoor wilderness therapy programs and have made many fires like this) as a box of matches sat on the ground by us so that we could burn the end of the nylon rope that we used for our bows.

AHHH, but the bliss of busy boy's as they determinedly try to out do their mother.