It can get mighty hot in the summer especially if you are out hiking or prospecting. So here is an old bush trick: find a stream or a lake, take your boots and socks off and stick your feet in the water. It starts by cooling your feet off but also cools your blood circulating through your feet down and this will slowly cool your whole body down. It’s a way of cooling yourself down without going swimming.
You can even do it in town by putting your feet into a container of cold water. Also, in summer I would have a bandana with me that I could get wet and put over my head or around my neck and as the water evaporates, it cools a person down. A wet bandana across your face also works to filter out some of the smoke which we are certainly getting a lot of this year.
It is important to monitor yourself, especially on hot days, because you want to avoid heat exhaustion and heat stroke. So pace yourself and drink lots of fluids.
As one prospector use to say, “For six months of the year Mother Nature is trying to freeze you to death, then summer comes and she is trying to fry you like a slice of bacon on a hot cast iron griddle.” Best to take it easy and cool down a little.
One year, on a scorching hot day I was out doing a prospecting traverse on the barrens. It was a long way away from any lakes and I was checking out the bottom of a cliff. I came to a place where a large slab of rock, the size of several houses, had broken away from the cliff and created a fissure in the rocks. It was plenty big enough to walk into, so I did because it provided shade and shade is hard to come by on the barrens.
The shade was a welcome relief and I noticed the farther I went in the cooler the rocks and air got. It felt wonderful. I went in maybe 10 metres, sat down on a rock and leaned back onto the fissures cool wall. I even put my head back, closed my eyes, and was half asleep in the blissfully cool surroundings.
A little while later I snapped awake. I don’t know if I heard something or sensed something but when I opened my eyes and looked towards the entrance of the fissure there stood a big barren lands wolf. He was looking in at me looking out and I reckon we were both a little surprised and thinking “whoa, what’s that critter doing here.”
I slowly got up because it was time to get back to work. The wolf moved out of view, and I walked to the entrance and looked around. The wolf was sitting maybe 25 metres away and I continued my traverse, but when I looked back the wolf was walking towards the fissures entrance which was sort of a cooling station for the area I assumed. That’s the way a lot of wildlife encounters seem to occur. Both participants are a little surprised when their path’s cross, they say hello and then they both go their own ways and do their own thing.
Now in the north one doesn’t have to go very deep in the ground to find much cooler temperatures and even permafrost. So, if you dug a chamber under a building and opened the hatchway in the summer you would get cooler air flowing into your house. You could even build a chamber, put an insulated roof on it and have a shelter for hot days or to escape forest fires. Or use it like a big refrigerator to store things.
Then if you go even deeper, the rocks start to get warm and then hot so you could use that air for heating in winter. One could add heat to the rocks in the summertime to be used in winter or add cold to the rocks in winter to be used in summer. Yet we do neither and yet with all the old mines in the area, we could do both. Seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. The fact that we put refrigerators inside and use energy to cool them seems odd. Perhaps we need to re-think things and do some experimenting to make better use of our resources.
As someone once said, “It’s either too hot or its too cold. Just right is hard to find.”