Howling of Wolves

Finally I have heard the true sound of the north. This morning I was driving north on the Alaska highway, heading out to a pickup at 8 in the morning. It was around 6, and I was exhausted from not enough sleep, so for the first time in my driving career, pulled off for 30 minutes sleep. I choose to stop next to a river, miles from any town. I got out to have a stretch and in the early morning silence heard a couple of wolves howling in across the river. A truely beautiful sound. I got back in the vehicle and went to sleep, well pleased with this moment.

I awoke a little later and was fine to do the pickup and drive home. 640km today and feeling a little tired. Took the shot above on the way back, of the Peace River which is the river that dominates this part of the world.

Also took the one tonne challenge. I included the truck in the survey and discovered I account for a massive 44 tonnes of pollution per year. Without the truck I reach the national average of 5.5 tonnes. Can we reduce this much? Not that easily. Wen-shu and I are pretty good in terms of reducing a lot of the charactristics already. Mainly due to cost actually, but certain we feel good about doing the right thing too. In fact we get penalised for some things that we in fact do well on. For example I don't use ethanol fuels as in reality they don't decrease emissions as they are much less efficient. So the car might produce less emission burning a litre of fuel, but it needs more fuel to cover a set distance, negating this effect. I actually use some acetone in the fuel on occasion and this improves my consumption by around 10%, but only on non ethonal diluted fuels.
I'm thinking of trying acetone in the truck to get better consumption there too. 10% would be good as it is a guzzler.