37 piles

The first snows fall at 8000 in mid October around the Wild West.  It was time to do a final clean-up day.

D explaining how to cut down a tree

Me doing the work.

The next 37 pictures are piles of wood and brush.  Sorry for the lack of Instagram-quality content, but I wanted to inventory what we did this year.  Add to these 37 piles, two large pick-up loads and a large trailer load of wood that we sold, about 15 brush piles that the fire department chipped for us after the AmeriCorp work, and about three pickup loads that were pilfered by a Wild West neighbor.  With the AmeriCorp hours we have logged almost 200 hours of work, mostly hard labor, on the property.  

The area we want to build is pretty well clear of dead fall and the trees have been limbed up somewhat, and we have cleared dead fall from quite a bit of the land down to the road to create defensible fire space, but we could easily spend another entire season cleaning up.  We'll call this good for the year.

 

so rotten

big one!

Americorps to the rescue!

We've been in contact with the local fire department. They are concerned about the amount of dead fall on our property and other parcels along the ridge because a forest fire could very easily spread from the large, un-managed forest in the remote drainage basin bordering our property to the north to our property and the others in the Wild West, many of which have expensive homes on them.  The fire chief turned D onto the AmeriCorps program, which had a crew of 6 or 7 young people stationed in the area.  Forestry management for fire protection around homes is one of the skills they are trained in and wanted to practice.  We gave them practice!

The AmeriCorps crew with Husband

Over the course of 2 days in July (2015), we worked with them to take down, move, and stack an enormous amount of dead wood.  They were incredibly hard working, engaged young men.  They were very happy to eat the lunch and snacks we provided, since their stipend for food is $5 per day per person!  We were happy to offer this small trade for a lot of back breaking work!

Two of the crew were chainsaw qualified, so we tasked them with cutting dead fall.

Snags are dangerous so we focused on them first.

Moving logs we had previously cut on the ridge line down to the road.

Two of the crew members spent all of one day, for a total of 10 man hours, chucking cut logs down from the ridge. D is caught in this action shot of flying wood helping them get the pile the last 40 feet or so.

Kings of the hill.

It was fun working with these guys!

A couple of other crew members helped on day 2, of which I have no photos. There was a lot of brush cutting on day 2.  We said thanks by throwing a pizza party for them in town at the end of day 2.

Overall, the AmeriCorp crews did about 50 hours of hard labor, which likely would have taken the two of us considerably longer given our aged physiques and tendency to stop for beer after 3 or 4 hours.  Thanks AmeriCorps!

Stay tuned for another post scheduled for next Saturday at 6 a.m. Mountain Time.