A few days at the cabin with Patti 01-17-14

I got to the cabin around noon on Sunday.
Got moved in and had a little lunch. 
After lunch I went over to where Dave and I cut down some trees a few weeks ago and Harvey and I bucked some of the trees up last week.
I wanted to see how well my cordless electric chain saw would work for limning out trees before bucking them up. The good thing is that the saw is very light which takes a lot of the strain off my back. The down side is that the saw cuts kind of slow and the battery doesn’t last very long. I used up one battery just limning out these small Tan Oaks.

 

I took a little break back at the cabin and then took a walk down the road toward where we shoot. I wanted to clear some brush off the road.

I particularly wanted to clear this one spot where a bunch of redwood branches were starting to take over the road.

I cut out some branches as high as I could reach and cut  just enough saplings to open the road.

Monday;

After breakfast I bucked up the rest of trees that Dave, Harvey and I had been working on and began bringing logs back to camp.

One Jeep load at a time.

The first load is stacked by the cabin

After a short break I decided to stack some of the dry Madrone on the porch and fill the wood box in the cabin.

Spent the rest of the day hanging out and reading.

Tuesday;

After breakfast I brought in another jeep load of logs and added them to the stack by the cabin.

After a short break, I took a ride up to the bear spring to see if there was any more wood available on that old downed Madrone. There is still some wood left on the tree but getting to it is a bit tough so I will have to look some where else for dry firewood. 
I cut on a few other down trees but they were all soft and punkey. Not good for firewood.

Went back to the cabin and hung out there until Patti arrived around 3:00.

We spent the rest of the day sitting around in the cabin visiting.

Wednesday;

Patti and I spent most of the day playing with firewood.

We brought all the cut up wood back to camp and stacked it.

You don’t get much wood out of a Tan Oak as they are tall skinny trees with small limbs near the crown. 
This is all we got out of three trees.

I will have to cut down several more trees to have enough firewood to get us through next fall.

There was a widow maker hanging in a tree where we were gathering wood. I think it was the top of one of the trees that we cut down. It had broken off a couple years ago and was tangled in the branches of another tree.

I tied the bottom of the widow maker to the jeep with a tow strap and pulled it down.

 

We cut it up and loaded the logs into the jeep.

The wood from the widow maker was kind of dry and a bit punky so we took it back to camp and put it in the wood box in the cabin to be burned tonight.

We took the rest of the day off and just hung out and enjoyed the day.

That night and the next morning we used up most of the dry wood in the wood box. When we left, around 1:00 Thursday we put all the wood that was left on the porch in the cabin and loaded a large pile onto the porch. I think there is enough dry fire wood left for a couple more days.

As always we had a great time at the cabin.
Now we have to get started getting things ready to go to Quartzsite around the middle of next month.