Raising Sydney Bush Baby

We have had so much fun being parents to Sydney and Blaze. We are finally at that point that we hardly remember what it feels like not to have our babies around. Sydney just turned 3 on April 29th. We can’t believe it. We’ve had such memorable and interesting times learning to raise a baby trapline style. She’s flown in many bush planes, had adventurous boat rides, been along to harvest and butcher a moose, helped pull in nets of salmon, and logged almost 200 miles in a dogsled.

Becoming parents and continuing our trapline lifestyle has been a challenge. It adds a whole other element of worry and preparation to the annual trip to the trapline. We’ve had to adjust to our new roles: me the caregiver and home support and Tyler the sole provider. If you read my journals from the first 2 winters I spent on the trapline with Sydney you would have seen plenty days I passed feeling lonely and isolated. I was forced to do my best to pretend everything was great and normal when I didn’t feel that way at all, for Sydney’s sake. Before Sydney was born, I never took our trapping income too seriously. I knew that if we had a bad year that Tyler and I would both be able to get summer jobs to make up for it and it was just the two of us to support and worry about after all. Once we started the family we are dependent on Tyler to make a living. We have to take the trapping very seriously and I don’t go to a normal job in the summer time. Tyler working a lot both in the summer and in the winter when we are out in the woods means me being alone with Sydney…..a lot, sometimes for days, without seeing Tyler. It’s very hard.

On our second winter with Sydney on the trapline, the winter she was 1 year old, we came up with a solution in order for me to feel somewhat sane. I decided to travel with Sydney in the dogsled to our line camp so I wouldn’t have to spend any nights without Tyler. I was pregnant with Blaze. I had done a little mushing when I was pregnant with Sydney and it went fine so I wasn’t too worried about that part. I had to decide which was the better option for us. Staying alone, pregnant and with Sydney for 3 nights at a time or traveling with Sydney in the dogsled in extreme weather in order for the family to stay together? Which option was safer? Staying alone I worried if something happened to me what would happen to Sydney? Going along on the trapline with Sydney also made me nervous but seemed at least more interesting for both of us.

It wasn’t easy for me to make this decision. Part of me wanted to stay warm and secure in the main cabin with Sydney but the experience of being in the woods yet never leaving the yard of the main cabin feels like a prison. I chose this life with Tyler to have adventure, not with the idea of sitting alone in a cabin cooking and cleaning. It may sound like I took risks with Sydney but I want her to have a good experience outdoors also. I wanted to do everything possible to make her trips safe and warm.

As soon as we made the decision to travel with her I began working on her clothing for the trips. Sydney had a green goose down snowsuit. We had a black bear hide and I took a square of it and reinforced the seat of her suit with bear fur so she always had a good seat. If your just sitting around outside in the cold your butt can get very chilly. She called it her bear butt. I sewed her large solid beaver fur mukluks (boots) with fleece liners and a thick felt sole. Then I made fur gauntlet mittens that reached almost the full length of her arms. She wore a rabbit fur hat with a balaclava over that. Cindy Lewis made a very nice bunting for Sydney made out of Sheepskin and I used that as a seat for Sydney in the sled along with wool blankets on her lap.

The next thing I was concerned about was safety. Dogsleds aren’t exactly the safest place for a baby to be on a rough trapline trail. We began scheming up ideas for Sydney to have the safest ride in my sled. I wanted a type of box in the sled that would protect her from whipping willow branches on narrow trail. We also wanted to keep her from being thrown from the sled if we ran into a tree going fast or downhill. We decided to put some type of a seat belt at the back of the sled to secure her in kind of like a car seat. Tyler and I worked for about 4 hours modifying my sled for Sydney. The next day we strapped her in and I took her down the trail with a few dogs for a test run.

I was pretty nervous to make the first 15 mile trip. I was unsure about how she would handle being strapped into the dogsled for half the day. I worried about the weather and if she would stay warm enough just sitting there near the ground. We took our first trip two days before Thanksgiving, expecting to have our holiday at the lake cabin. When we got to the river crossing just a half mile away from the cabin we realized it had overflowed badly the night before and we couldn’t cross the river with Sydney so low in the sled without soaking her at the beginning of the trip. We had to turn around and go home. Tyler went back out with the team after we got home and broke trail with a new river crossing to try again the next day. It was OK it worked out that way as it was another practice run of sorts to prepare my Momma brain for the trip. There is a lot to remember when you shut down camp for a week in the winter; water buckets must be drained, our well has to be drained before we leave, you have to remember various last minute items like headlamps, fire starter kits, trail snacks and tea in the thermos and don’t forget your book to read while your out at line camp. With Sydney I had to make sure I had enough diapers, the sippi cup and a little entertainment for her.

The day before Thanksgiving my heart was beating fast as our 8 dogs lunged and pulled against their harnesses in front of our sleds. I pulled the safety clip off my tree and we began running down the trail. It was about 0 degrees and the trip was really lovely. I hadn’t been on a trip since I was pregnant with Sydney. I worked on settling into the rhythm of mushing again, leaning and jumping from runner to runner and pushing the sled past trees on sharp corners. Dog mushing is a very active sport on rough trails. You have to pay constant attention to the trail and the dogs. I imagine its the real life form of what people are trying to get out of playing a video game. It’s all action, hand eye coordination and excitement and it’s real.

As it turned out Sydney happened to be impatient during all of the same times I’ve always been impatient on the trail, sitting around waiting for Tyler to make trapping sets. He can be very meticulous and it’s easy to get chilled just standing around waiting while he works. On that first trip with Sydney we caught 2 lynx, 3 marten and a fox. At the end of our fifteen mile trip Sydney began to cry and whine constantly to get out of the sled and I became anxious to get to the cabin and get a fire going in the woodstove. It was nice that she wasn’t a true baby anymore and it was easy to tell the difference in her cry. I knew she wasn’t in pain or danger but just upset at being stuck in the sled too long. Halfway through the trip we had stopped to have a snack and a drink on the trail. I didn’t want her to get her hand out of her warm nest so I fed her little bites like a baby bird and poured warm tea from the thermos into her sippi cup for a drink.

Sydney was so excited to come upon the new cabin in the woods. An exciting discovery for a toddler. When I got her out of her sled nest to carry her into the line cabin I could feel that she had kept nice and toasty the whole trip over. During the rest of the season Sydney eventually traveled twice at 25 below 0 back to our main cabin in my sled and did fine. The trip to the cabin with Sydney also marked the first time for me to see the burn damage from the wildfire over by the lake. It’s so strange that a place can change that you don’t even recognize it any more, its very disorienting. It was sad to see the old trail with our old memories burned down. The only positive side to the burn is now there is a better view of things since you can see far when all the trees are gone.

As the cabin started warming I was able to take a few moments to absorb the scene as Sydney sat on the floor exclaiming “new cabin” over and over again. Tyler had just built this new line cabin the summer before as a replacement to the old one that didn’t keep us warm anymore. Our old cabin at the lake was never built for winter use, it was just a simple shelter more geared around the hunting season than long term winter survival. Tyler had flown out with our friend Don the summer before and built the whole thing in 18 days!!! Needless to say he didn’t have time to work out any of the interior accommodations during that time. He had to fly back to town in time for a summer job, building someone else a cabin home. There were already some very nice features that they were able to squeeze in during their short building trip: a good door, two windows, and a plywood floor. The large window was the window we had in the old cabin on the lake, a nice feature. There were piles of tools on the floor and totes filled with the contents of our old cabin scattered about. A tote of dishes and cookware, One with emergency food supplies, fishing gear, 1st aide kit, lots of miscellaneous stuff we may never use but when you live in the middle of nowhere it just doesn’t seem wise or right to get rid of stuff. We use foldout camp chairs as seating at the line camp. We have bedding that we’ve used over and over for years. It’s a lot of work furnishing 3 different cabins in the bush. Bedding takes up a lot of room in a boat plane or sled so we make due with what we’ve got as long as we can. We laid a piece of plywood over the top of two 55 gallon steel drums to serve as a temporary table/counter. There’s a loft in the new cabin but I didn’t want to sleep up there with Sydney yet as there weren’t stairs yet or any sort of rail. Also, I didn’t want to have to get in and out of it myself because I was pregnant and pregnant people pee a lot. Tyler was pretty disappointed that I didn’t want to use the loft after he went through all of the trouble putting it in. The first couple of nights we just slept camping style on a huge nest of blankets on the floor.

After the cabin had warmed up a bit we grabbed the ice auger, a fishing string and the water buckets and headed down to the lake. We got to show Sydney the magic of drilling a hole in the ice and then dropping a lure down to catch a fish. We caught a couple of fish in the first ten minutes much to Sydney’s glee. ” Get fish Momma” she would yell, ”Get fish!” We had fried fish for dinner. Side note, pike is pretty high in mercury, and it’s not good for pregnant people to eat tons of it. We went to bed well fed, warm and safe.

The next day was Thanksgiving and we had a couple real treats that day. First off I bundled Sydney up to go have a fresh look at the lake in the morning and as soon as we emerged from the shelter of the trees, right there before us was a WOLF! It had been sniffing the dogs tracks on our trail. Surprised at our commotion it trotted off across the lake. Sydney got   to meet a wolf in person for Thanksgiving. The next surprise was dinner. When the plane flew out to pick Tyler up after building the cabin I had sent a box of goodies to save in the cabin for just such a future occasion. Now the box of goodies was there waiting for us on Thanksgiving. We had potato chips, stove top stuffing, canned cream corn, instant potatoes, chicken gravy mix and a mix of ptarmigan and grouse meat we had been saving for Thanksgiving, and a can of black olives for appetizers, which is one of Sydney’s favorites. For dessert we had a package of chocolate filled milano cookies. We were pleased with the extravagant camp meal.

We feel so grateful to have Sydney to share our lives with and now with Blaze our family is complete and I hope for many more great adventures to come with both of them. Thanks for being such I tough little girl Sydney! Mommy and Daddy love you to tears.

Meanwhile Tyler is going back to work building a cabin for someone next week. We are busy carrying plants in and out of our greenhouse every day. The sand hill cranes and swans have arrived in the neighborhood as part of their spring migration. It wont be long before we hear our first frog croak in the pond in our yard. Life feels good for us. I hope everyone out there is doing OK! Tyler added marten chimes to the shop and I am working with Sarah Lewis to put some of her woodcrafts she makes in the winter time in the store for sale. Also, Tyler did an interview for a podcast called Trapping Today a few weeks ago if your interested in listening here is the link.

https://podcast.app/tyler-selden-from-the-last-alaskans-podcast-e94283815/