Stove Stories

[Pony Soldier]

I just got home to work and discovered no power. Just another reason why I have wood heat.

Anyway I felt I needed to share some stories from my past about stoves. For many years we used an army surplus yukon stove in the tent in our field camps. They were made with a feed mechanism that would hook up to a jerry can. When I worked in southeast Alaska we had one set up in our tent that ran on the dregs of our jet fuel for the helicopter. Yoi would turn it on and the fuel would drip into the stove. As it got hotter the unit would drip faster and you had to turn it down- carefully.

We must have turned it down too far because in the middle of the night it felt like bugs crawling on my face. I would slap them and try to go back to sleep. This lasted for about a hour and finally my roomy lit a lantern to see what the bug was. The inside of the tent was covered with little greasy soot balls of partially burned jet fuel. Both of us were just as black and shiney as stars in a minstrel show of the 40s. Even the noseeums wouldn't touch us.

 

[EdP]

So, you did blackface back in the day. Hope nobody took pics.

Darn that't a funny story.

 

[long hunter]

A few years back we were camped in a old log cabin (shack really ) in WVA. deer season it was very cold and about a foot of snow on the ground and blowing wind (inside also) we had one of those little old timey kerosene stoves, After chinking the holes in the walls with newspaper the best we could, decided to camp out in the main room one each on along side the bomb. laid out the bed rolls and set in for the night, along about 3 in the morning bright flashes woke me up, looked at the stove and about every 15 seconds it would flare up and jump off the floor and go whump (wonder it did not burn down the shack) yelled at my hunting buddy told him to open the dam door (what there was of it( grabbed the stove bye the wire handle and threw it out the door into the snow bank. He looked at me and said what we going to do now told him to throw another blanket over his sleeping bag and go back to sleep as we we not going out as there was about another 6 in of snow and still coming down.

 

[Pony Soldier]

Story number 2.
We had a really good army surplus store in the 70s. Now it's in Shelly, Idaho. During a snoop I discovered that the army had made a portable pot belly stove called a Wheeling stove. It had a coal grate in it and I was looking to extend the heat during the night. I found a local distributor that sold lump coal at a reasonable price.

Our plan was to bank the stove with coal before bed time. Since it burned slower we figured it would last till morning. We had never burned coal so it was a learning experience. It was not really cold so we turned the stove down and drifted off to sleep.

About 1 or 2 we woke up to a very smokey tent and coal smoke is stinky. We opened the tent flaps so we could breathe and started to unravel the puzzle. Finally we pulled off the stove pipe and raised it up to look through it for the blockage. At the most inopportune time my partner tapped the pipe while I was looking through it. In an instant I went from curious to gagging on the coal soot that covered my face. Once again I was black and miserable while my partners lay on the floor laughing so hard that they struggled to breath.

The moral - test out your stove so you understand how to run it before hunting season. I learned how to get the best out of that stove just in time for the company to quit stocking lump coal.

 

[11boo]

Muh Man. We used the same.


The top two pics are from Korea.

Bottom Right, you can just see the tripod we put our cans on. Gasoline. Plumbed into a tent. What could go wrong?

Nothing in my experience. We stayed decently warm, and dried our stuff out nightly. UH-1 was bringing in supplies, so we only had a few hundred pounds on that Ahkio (Mansled) in the pic. Tent/stove/water/gas/M60.

seems like a hundred years ago.

 

[Pony Soldier]

Story number three.
We had a field camp northeast of Seattle, Washington. This would have been in 1981 so we got to enjoy the volcanic ash as well as the endless rain. I remember noting white caps on verticle rock faces as we came into camp. Most of the crew had come in by helicopter and were unpacking when my crew walked into camp. I got the stove going and started dinner. One of the crew broke out a bottle of peppermint schnapps. The whole crew assembled in the tent and as stories broke out they started passing the bottle.

Everyone got warm and with some food were feeling quite well. Suddenly one of the engineers felt the need to water a bush. As he stood up he went from stone cold sober to falling down drunk. One step and fell flat on top of the glowing Yukon stove. In that second he relived the opening to the show "King Fu" where Carridine lifts up the hot kettle and brands his arms to leave the building. He also changed the the old description of "toilet hugging drunk" to "stove hugging drunk".

We wrapped his hands in snow and rags and put him to bed. By morning we found him under his cot with his hands in the ice filled bowl he puked in. I don't think I ever saw him drink to excess again.

Just remember "stove hugging drunk" is the next level above " toilet hugging drunk".

 

[Pony Soldier]

Story 4

We would get off work on Friday nite, gather our gear and ride into camp in the dark or by moonlight. The experience is unbelievable.

Anyway as we pulled into camp, we would break up the tasks, and go to our jobs and meet in the tent. The horses got watered and fed after we pulled the tack off. The food got pulled out of the soft panniers and got transfered to the hard panniers while pop and things that needed to be cold got put into the cooler in the creek. Up to that point the only camp task was lighting a lantern. As we got our jobs done, I split some kindling and went into the tent. The Wheeling stove had a number of sticks on top of the lid so I just threw them in with the kindling . I lit it off, added a couple of chunks and went outside to help my partners finish up their tasks.

We finished up everything and went into the tent to lay out our beds and go to sleep. As I opened the flap I noticed a haze about the same time that my eyes started to water and it became hard to breath.

In my rush I failed to notice that that pile of wood on the stove was a packrat scent pile. The haze was packrat urine being vaporized. Talk about breath taking , that vapor might even neutralize covid or at least make you wish you had covid to neutralize your senses.

We cleared out the tent and settled down for the night. As I drifted off my hunting partner shook me awake and said "hold real still". I followed the headlamp to see a packrat sitting on top of my feet eating a cookie. My partner had his 45 colt cocked and he says, "I think I can shoot him in the head". I don't think I have ever moved my feet so fast.