A Day in the Ash Family Forest
Another day working in the Ash Family Forest (and thinking this would have been easier on my 30-year old body...)
Thought I'd give you a peek into our day! Here's a section of trail my hubby and I built over the last couple of days – wide enough to drive our ATV and wood chipper into the forest. My hubby is the human bulldozer and hand-shoveled all of it – one of these days we'll have to calculate how many yards of dirt he moves every day! In some areas he uses logs to help shore-up steep edges (preferably cutting them from uphill and rolling them down into place).
My job is to work in front of him: sighting the road, cutting salal, huckleberry and small trees (I don't do chainsaws), clearing and hauling downed branches into future chipping piles, transplanting ferns (like the ones you see stabilizing the side of the new road in the photo), raking away anything that could pose a slide-plane under the dirt, then using a mattock to cut away the bank and loosen it for Jerry to shovel.
Each night I fall into bed thinking that there is no way I'll be able to convince my body to move, let alone dig and haul. But the sun is shining and the forest calls. So here we go again!
PLEASE NOTE: The Ash Family Forest consists of a main trail which is open to our neighbors and the rest of the forest which is currently in Forest Restoration and is not open to the public. The trail shown here is in the Forest Restoration portion and only for use by the Ash Family Forest crew.
Bobcat and deer prints all over the new dirt