The Wood Splitter

On a recent visit to with my parents, my father introduced me to a genre of YouTube videos that he has recently enjoy featuring people building remote log cabins from scratch in the woods. We started with The Outsider, which followed a father/son team in their building of a remote cabin deep in the woods somewhere in Canada. But with the help of auto-play and YouTube’s suggestions, we weaved our way through many others including Bush Radical & Girl in the Woods, a married couple who each share their outdoor skills on their own channels, Nik Rijavec whose cabin build in Slovenia is amazing (especially how he incorporates some massive tree roots in the interior). And Outdoor Boys, where a father and his young sons build, not a real cabin, but a fun outdoor shelter that any kid would enjoy camping in. These are but a few examples, you can really go down a rabbit hole when you start following this path.

On my return home, I didn’t have an off grid cabin to build. But I did have some wood to split, and some lost wedges to free from a failed previous attempt to do so. And inspired by these videos I’d been watching, I thought I’d give a try at recording my own little outdoorsman video. My woodpile came from a pine tree that used to stand next to our house, that I’ve written about before here in this blog. And I realized I couldn’t go right into trying to split more wood without providing some of the tree’s backstory first, which I did with old photos and narration. Anyway, that’s the setup. Without further ado, here’s my own small homage to this genre of YouTube video that my Dad introduced me to. If you’ve nothing better to do for 14 minutes and 10 seconds, I invite you to give it a watch.