I thought I’d take a little ride up in the hills by my house today. I got the chainsaw out and fueled it up as I suspect there are a lot of trees across the roads from this winters rain storms.
I rode up the hill on roads like this one.
Trees blocking the road
It wasn’t long before I came to the first trees across the road.
I just wanted to clear enough of the trees out of the way to get on though as the dozer can push the rest of them off the road at a later time.
I continued on until I came to the next tree down, a fir tree a couple feet in diameter.
I cut that one up enough to get by and continued on.
Headed for the ride top
From there I was headed to the top of the ridge and ran into this downed tree just below the top which I cut out of the way.
The scotch broom was in bloom at the top.
I parked here at the overlook for a much needed break.
Guerneville
This overlook looks over the small town of Guerneville which is on the other side of those vineyards of Korbels.
After I was rested up a bit, I headed out this main fire road to check it out.
Looks worse than it is
I didn’t get far until I ran into this big slide. It had some five foot diameter fir trees in it with a lot of mud. I checked it out and decided there was more here than I had energy to deal with for now.
After checking the slide out I figured I can get through the logs with the dozer without too much trouble and I’ll just leave the dirt there and squeak on by. Some of the logs in there are larger than the little dozer can push, so will have to go over or around some of them.
Only gas for one last cut
I had to turn around and retrace my tracks and went down another road and ran into this three foot diameter fir log that had fallen over across the road.
I didn’t think I had enough gas left in the saw to cut this one out and the saw’s chain was getting dull, but I thought if I can at least cut it once the dozer can push it off the road easier, so I tried and was able to cut it twice, not quite finishing the second cut before the saw ran out of gas.
I’m out of gas too
By this time I was more than out of gas, so I turned around and headed on back down the hill and went on home for a break.
After a good break I spent some time sitting in the yard taking it easy. I seemed to have pulled something in my left elbow which I think is going to take a long time to heal. I find it’s hard to left things without it going ouch.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
