The little piece of land we bought has a down-side. It contains an
access easement for private land that surrounds it. When this land was
originally parceled out, for some strange reason they put this access
road, bang-smack through the middle of the piece we bought. We decided
our first major task was going to have to be moving the road to afford
us more usable space and more privacy. What a lot of incredibly hard
and back-breaking work!!
Click
on any photo to see a larger view
Starting
to clear for the new road
Look carefully
& you can see a couple of folk hard at work.
This photo give you an idea
of the density of trees, though even in this photo much has
been cleared. You can also see a pile of sticks that shows
what dead wood we've cleared just in this small area. It was
so dense that you couldn't walk through it at all.
August 1999
Our friend
Tootie is marking the boundary line with bright orange spray
paint. You can see a couple of small trees have been felled,
and most of the debris removed.
The
road is starting to take shape - August 1999
You can see the
new road taking shape.
As you can see
in this photo, some of our trees are quite large. Mike would
chainsaw-fell a tree, saw off all the limbs and then I would
gather all the debris into a big pile to be disposed of later
(burned!)
Stump
Removal - September 1999
We paid a
neighbor for his labor and use of his bulldozer to clear the
stumps for our new road. This photo shows a close-up of Blaine
operating the bulldozer. I got a coating of dust trying to
take this photo!
Head-on view of
the dozer coming down the road to remove the stumps. Very
impressive.
Rear view of
dozer as it leaves a relatively clear path behind!
Mike proudly
showing off the new road. There's still a lot of work to be
done, shaping and grading, but as you can see - it definitely
looks like a road now. The earth was incredibly soft after
being churned up by the tree stumps and dozer. It was like
walking on a bed of flour!!
Lots
of Grading Required
Lots of grading
to be done. We had to go back and forth along the road a
zillion times to smooth out the road, and help it take its
shape!
We even got our
friend Garr to do some of the grading!
Pulling
and Stacking Logs
Before we bought
our forklift attachment, the logs were chained up and drug to
their stacking destination (by the side of the old
road).
We have two
decent sized piles of logs stacked by the side of
the old road - awaiting construction!
Burning
all that excess wood - January 2000
Mike starts the
fire with a blow-torch We pull some of the brush aside and
start small!
