Road Work

Well - it will be 4 weeks tomorrow since we arrived here. Hard to believe.  We have woken up to sunshine almost every day. Perfect weather - except for the drought conditions. But yesterday and today we had a bit of rain, not enough to help the farm crops and livestock, but a little bit of rain at least. The air smells sweet with the bit of moisture we've had.
I'm sure we will get better at this blog thing as we go along, but for now, just a quick update. We've put in two sections of road, what we call the lower and upper. (Yeah, we could probably come up with more innovative names) The lower section has the base rock added, and still needs a final layer of finer stone, and the upper section is still being bulldozed as it has a pretty steep grade. They have been working hard on it today, so it's just about time for me to go look at the progress.  We had a lot of fill sitting at the top of the property, some that we had created ourselves this month while clearing out the shed, and some that was there when we bought this property 20+ years ago. So they trucked it down and spread it on the road and in an area where the upper and lower roads meet.  I'll know later on how many loads it took!

This is a view looking south along the lower road. It curves around a up a slight hill at the end, and joins into our existing road.

This is a view looking west and down the upper road. We tried to create a road that has some nice long curves to it. You can't really tell, but at this point it is still too steep, and our friend Brennan is working hard to get the grade down.

I should mention that while we had thought about doing some form of a lower road as a way of getting to the new house location, the upper road was Brennan's idea. At first we weren't sure about it - we didn't want to take down more trees or disturb the vegetation. But we quickly agreed that it gave us a way to be in the heart of the woods, to walk undisturbed, and to create some small paths running off of the road and into the other sections of the forest and towards the river.  We walk these now every night, learning the names of the trees and peering into the woods that now have a bit more sunlight coming in here and there. We are so glad we agreed !