Last of the wood piles

After five long years, the last of wood piles are gone. I finally got up the nerve to take the pickup down into the woods… and get her back out. This opens up lots of possibilities. Instead of hauling bags of mulch in a wheelbarrow, I can drive the entire load to where it’s needed. Same for firewood.Couldn’t have done it without the pickup and, sadly, it did not come through unscathed. You really can’t see how big the dent is in these photos. And, ironically, the good steel in this older trucks makes is more difficult to remove some dents.

UPDATE: The guys at Xtreme Body managed to fix the dent and put the trim back on… all for $120.

Haulin’ logs

During the 30+ years we’ve lived in our home (on 3 acres) we’ve thinned out a lot of trees, mostly scrub cedar. Woodsman that I am, I chainsawed them into logs and stacked them, thinking someone would want them for some purpose. Wrong. They’ve been sitting where I stacked them for years.
Today I started getting rid of them… with the help of Minty Fresh, the family pickup truck. It was always my hope I could drive the truck down into the woods and haul shit out with logs at the top of the list. But having no experience driving off-road in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, I’ve been reluctant to tackle the rough terrain and steep-ish grade. Until today.I flipped the lock-out hubs to LOCKED… put the low-range gear lever in “granny low” and eased down the hill. I scraped a tree once or twice but the pickup is so beat up you’d never find the spot. I loaded up the extra-long bed with logs and made it back to the road without a hitch (although I do have a hitch).
Aside from my lack of off-road/4WD experience, the big obstacle to this project was nobody wanted the logs. But as (bad) luck would have it, my friend George has some big-ass brush piles as a result of last spring’s tornado… and he offered to let me add my logs to his piles which he will safely burn.I’ve got maybe half a dozen more truck loads but it’s a labor of love and great exercise. And if I role the pickup… a great blog post. [Photos]

Improving the view from the deck

We have a beautiful view from the deck at the rear of our home. Front and center is/was a cedar tree (the one with the bird house) that that started looking pretty gnarly so we called the tree guys to cut it down, along with a few other cedar trees that just weren’t adding to the view.


These guys did some work for us back in January. They’re not cheap but they are really good.

Foxes


Spotted this little critter coming home tonight. He/she and two of his/her pals were eyeing the cat you can see in the background. We’ve seen a single fox a few times but this was our first sighting of three. Update: A neighbor took the photo below.