It's like a scavenger hunt, but only more bizarre.

Alas! Cabin Dweller has gone over to the darkside, with its running water and its flushing toilets. For shame! My water comes in big blue carboys and that's the way I like it!

(Well, actually, the plumbed places I looked at this fall were all even worse than the place I was living, so that never happened.)

But in their dirge for the proper cheap-ass Alaskan Lifestyle™, they mentioned experiences with stumbling across weird stuff around their home. Namely, caribou heads nailed to trees. You might think `Wow, how random!,` and indeed I can't top that. But I can identify with the experience.

I frequently walk my home, sometimes heading back into the refuge, sometimes not. And about every time I go, I find some new, totally random thing out there. It started with a hobo camp hidden about 300 yards back from where I dump my slop. I didn't see it for the longest time because it's blocked by a thick stand of spruce. But when I went back there, someone built a camp out of tent parts, blankets, tarps, and other random crap. What got me is the cause for abandonment. It appears that it survived the winter, got to spring, and then a ridgepole broke. Whoever was living there could manage -40° (No one was in my cabin then), but apparently thought it was too much effort to get a new stick. A note said that someone can use it if they fix it.

Hooooookay.

Other things I've found include cookware in random places in the woods, and strange random shacks and sheds. Stacks of spent brass, and no shortage of beer bottles. There's a random dog-house just plunked out there that I'll tear down one of these days. There's random bags, torn and worn by the non-existant wind and very existent animals, tied up in trees, their contents long since gone.

One of these days, I'll also abandon the dry home, and move into a posh mansion with both running water and indoor rest facilities, just as soon as I have the time to commit to the project (Also, moving in the winter is a bit of a bad idea for me). In the mean time, I'm content finding random appliances, buildings, and signs of unwelcome habitation around my home, and resigned to living near the dog musher equivalent of welfare-parents, quite pleased with the neighbours that I see frequently enough to converse, and consigned to the fact that even if I get several of the feral dogs, I won't get enough of them to make a dent in their numbers.

Actually, now that CabinDweller mentions it, the outhouse stalagmites are kinda really annoying.