The weekend has, once again, kept us rather busy. Yesterday we went out to take a tree that had come down off the trail — it was supposed to be a half hour project at most but somehow we ended up out doing trail work for 5 or 6 hours. It was necessary. It needed to be done. It wasn’t exactly boringĀ but… it definitely wasn’t what I had in mind. I was less that thrilled to be out there and, I’m quite sure, I made this clear to Travis several times. I was hungry. I hateĀ being hungry. And anyone who knows me well canĀ attestĀ at just how lovely I can be when I am hungry.
Still, we got what we needed to get done, done (or at least mostly done.) We actually created one entirely new section of trail that we ended up running on today, which was exciting. It’s basically a shortcut to our main trail but it’s still nice because the dogs like to see new things. It will probably be better to run on in the winter than it is now, provided we get plenty of snow. As it is, there are a lot of rocks and we have to crawl through several sections so that the dogs can get good footing.
We also cut down limbs on our main trail and fixed areas that were lacking in dirt. On several sharp turns we had places were some of the dogs had the potential Ā of getting swung into small branches. This wasn’t really something we wanted to happen so we removed them just as a precaution. In more than one place, we may have gone slightly overboard but better to be overly cautious.
There were also several places where we hacked away at banks and added dirt. One section of the trail was particularly rutted because it’s essetially become a small creek. While this itself wouldn’t present a problem, the way it was rutted in particular made it difficult to drive the four-wheeler (for me, not Travis) so we fixed this section and made it Sarah-proof.
We also filled in one particullary deep hole on the trail so that dogs couldn’t fall in and get hurt. We were sitting looking at it trying to find a good solution (it was a mud hole, full of water, and at least knee deep if not more) when Travis came up with a brilliant solution: there was an old rotting log nearby and we took the rotted wood, broke it up into chunks and filled it in. It worked really really well.
Funny enough, the tree we set out to remove had, by the time we got out to it, had been taken care of by someone else who was probably looking for firewood. Sick of working, we embarked on an adventure up a trail that Travis couldn’t remember where it led to. We never did find out. The willows started growing in too thick and we kept getting hit as we tried to drive up the trail. We ended up turning back. I’m sure we will try to tackle it again soon.
Strangely, at the end of all this I felt rather unaccomplished. Although the changes were evident when we hit the trail today, it seemed to take longer than it should have (probably because I was working at a glacial pace.)
Today we took the dogs out on two long, back to back runs. We ran them this morning, came back to the house and let them eat and rest for awhile, and then we hit the trail again tonight. All-in-all we were really impressed with how the dogs did. It was there first real big test and they all passed with flying colors.
I wish there was something special to tell you about, something that jumped out in particular about the run itself, something exciting we saw or did, but the real exciting thing was just seeing how well the dogs performed and how excited they were even at the end of the second run. Even when we got back to the yard, the dogs were still barking and screaming because they wanted to go. You can’t ask for more.
Well, that’s all for now!
