A week at the cabin 05-18-14

Tuesday;
I arrived at the cabin after an uneventful hour and a half ride from Santa Rosa. 
By the time I had the jeep unloaded and the refrigerator hooked up it was already getting hot.
I don’t normally do any work on the first day and this day was no exception.
I did however take a walk up to check the springs. The camp spring is still producing water but it is down to barely a trickle. The cabin is producing about the same amount of water as it was last fall which is a little less than normal.

I took the top and doors off the jeep.

Wednesday;
Cut firewood in the morning.

Patti decided that we needed a hammock up here so I assembled the hammock.

  

Took a walk to check out a spring up the road toward the Bear Spring. The spring is still flowing. We will have to tap this one.

Goofed off the rest of the day.

Thursday;
Cut firewood after breakfast.

The windows in the cabin are getting kind of dingy so I tried washing them. The windows are made from a heavy duty clear plastic film. I tried using the brush that I wash the RV with but the brush is a little stiff and I was unable to get the windows very clean because I couldn’t put much pressure on the plastic. I will try it again with a sponge.  

I test drove the hammock for a while.

Took a walk to the slag heap via the first bench.

Stopped at the second for just a moment to check for a tick.

The slag heap is large rock with a good view of the valley. Before we started camping where the cabin is we used to camp here in the winter.

Here is the view from the slag heap.

Friday;

In the morning I bucked up the last of the trees that Bob had cut down.

Patti arrived around 12:00. We got her moved in and sat around for a while.

Saturday;

I dragged some plastic pipe up to the cabin spring. I am trying to bring the overflow from the spring down the hill so it can be used for irrigation. I didn’t have enough plastic pipe available so I will have to bring some more up.

We took a ride to the Bear Spring.

There is still plenty of water in this spring but it is too far from the cabin to be useful.

From the Bear Spring we drove down to the barn where I wanted to check for plastic pipe down there.

The road to the barn goes by where we shoot clay’s but isn’t used much so we always have to clear something out of the way. 
Here is Patti moving a small sapling out of the way.

There is an old cabin down by the barn. Originally it was the pay masters office when this was a logging camp back in the old days

The building is long and narrow and sits down in a dark hole that seldom sees the sun. At one point I thought about rehabbing the cabin but it is just in a bad spot.

This is one of the most photographed item on the ranch.
It’s an old truck with a Madrone tree growing up through the middle of it.

We did a little weed wacking at the shooting site.

The string got all fowled up in the whacker so we had to quit.

We got about 2/3 of the flat done before we stopped.

Sunday;

Patti finished stacking the brush where we were cutting wood.

That completed phase two of the wood cutting project.

While Patti piled brush I put up some strings for the Morning Glories to climb on.

Later we went back down to the shooting area and did some more weed wacking. This time we concentrated on the road.

In the evening we took a ride to the north fork.

Crossing Indian creek

There is a good spring along the road.

Patti got a picture of a wild Tiger Lily at the north fork.

Monday;

In the morning we watched these two deer walk across the clearing.

 and a couple of young squirrels playing in a fir tree.

Later we cut some brush away from behind the cabin.

In the afternoon we heard an airplane flying around in circles. After a while we took a ride up to the top gate to see if we could figure out what was going on. We saw a S2F aircraft flying over the trees. We couldn’t tell if it was a fire bomber or a coastguard rescue plane. We couldn’t see any smoke anywhere so figured that the plane must have been a rescue craft. Eventually it flew away.

A small bird had built a nest on a beam at the south east corner of the cabin. It was there for a couple of days.

This morning it fell off the beam.

The eggs that were in the nest got broken.

Tuesday morning we got up started packing up and left for home around noon.

It was another great week at the cabin.

I won’t be going back to the cabin until the 2nd of July.