...and more field work

Tom and I have both managed to stay busy outside for the past couple of weeks.  I spent the better part of a week seemingly meandering through the pine forest behind Angel, continuing to map the beetle spots.  Tulio deployed the whole crew to chop the perimeters of each and every spot, and then assigned Angel to be my guide.  I had all of the previously identified spots tagged on my GPS map, Tulio had shown a few more to Angel, and between us we plotted a route to hit all of them, and then walked the edges.  We found that the GPS didn't work so well in the very small spots, so we ended up skipping some of the three or four tree sites, and we merged a few of the close-together smaller sites.  We also cut a few spots short when we would have had to risk our lives to climb down a cliff to incorporate a stump into our map, and I could only wonder who had balanced on the side of the cliff to cut the infected tree down in the first place.  Many of the spots are on steep hills going down into jungly creek bottoms, so we spent a lot of time carefully making our way over very rough terrain.  Angel was quite patient about waiting for me, and even going at my slow pace I found that I was exhausted at the end of the day, and was in bed and asleep by 7:30, and not awake and waiting for the alarm at 6am the next day.  I thought I was pretty fit, but this project was an endurance test...but now it's done, and we just have to put the GPSed lines into the mapping program to see how many acres are affected.

I also learned to drive the farm's tractor so I could bush hog the horse pastures.  They were bush hogged just before we brought the horses up last July, and with all the rain we have had since then, we haven't been able to get out there to clean them up until now.  There were a lot if weedy sticky things that the horses don't eat that needed to be knocked down, so I spent two afternoons driving in circles and cleaning up the pastures.  Now we can see the horses even when they have their heads down grazing, and we can see Kismet when she runs out to round them up.  Now we need just a little more rain so the new grass can grow.

Tom has been busy in a variety of small projects, with the most fun probably being putting in a bush bridge on one of the crossover roads.  The bridge washed out in the October floods, and we have been working on bigger projects, but it was this bridge's turn since the two concrete approach bridges are fixed.  The smaller bridge is really more work than the bigger bridges, which only really required gravel and fill to be dumped on the approach, and then running over the fill to pack it down.  For this smaller bridge, the old bridge had to be pulled out which involved a lot of digging, and then big logs need to be set into the banks before sticks, roofing, and fill are placed on top.  It's a lot of work, but with a crew of seven plus Tom, it's a two-day project.