Week Seven: Changes

Song of the Week: Changes by David Bowie

I was going to wait another week to do a blog on all the changes that have happened around the property, but I'm just too excited to wait. Our roads have been widened and all the areas for our cabins, dining hall, horse barn, etc. have been cleared. After months and months of planning, it's exciting to finally see changes happening to the property.

Change #1: We've got WATER! Our first well went in a couple of weeks ago. They drilled down 300 ft and hit 75 gallons a minute. For all of you (like me) who don't know much about water wells, apparently that's a lot of water. YAY!

Change #2: Tree Chopping! If you've ever had the pleasure of watching a logging company cut trees, you know how fascinating the whole process is. Really, I'm not kidding. This crazy little machine in the picture above is the cutter. He's a multitasker. He cuts trees at their base, and then uses his monster of a hand to hold the tree in his grip as he continues to cut more trees. Once he's holding like six or seven trees (and I mean really big trees, not little twigs) in his claw, then he gently lays them in a pile.

Change #3: Trees go bye bye. You can see a little green machine in the background of this picture. That's a skidder. He picks up the huge piles of trees, and drags them here to the loading dock. The yellow machine is the loader. The loader picks up a bunch of trees with his arm, and runs them through this little machine that cuts off the branches. The trees are then placed on the back of truck and hauled off.

Change #4: No more roots and stumps. So once the loggers leave, the dozers come in. The root rake pulls up all the roots, and then the big daddy dozer pulls up all the stumps. They take the mess left behind from the loggers, and push all the brush into a big pile for burning.

Change #5: New Entrance. Drew finally got to play on some of his "toys". The new third entrance, leading to the maintenance area, has been cleared. In this picture, Drew is putting the pipe under the road.

Change #6: Digging Foundations. Drew has begun the process of digging out the foundations for our cabins.

Change #7: Burning the brush. We were able to get most of the piles of brush burned this weekend.

So many changes. Can't wait to see what the next couple of weeks bring.