Fire Trail Road Maintenance With The Bulldozer

Friday January 21, 2022 Guerneville CA.

Tom trims my trees

My brother Tom pulled his tractor and trailer into my yard this morning to do some work.

He wanted to trim up some of my fruit trees so he could have a better view from his house. He brought his tree trimmer over. He said I wasn’t pruning my apple trees right as they were too high. He was right so he started with those, trimming the tops way back. I left him at it and went up into the hills to do some dozer work.

All trimmed up

When I returned just before dark he had the trees all trimmed up and looking good.

Rocks

Anyway, as I said I headed up into the hills to do some dozer work but stopped here and cleaned the rocks off the road that had fallen onto it during the winter.

Bulldozer work

The dozer was about half way up the hill. I had to add some transmission fluid before I started it up to do some work higher on the hill.

Main fire trail work

It started right up and I headed on up to the main fire trail where I was going to do some work on the road out this way. You can see the big dirt berm on the outer edge of the road which I plan to remove in most places.

Berm removal

During the forest fire a couple years ago the fire guys put a berm on the outside of this road which isn’t good as the water can’t get off the road when it rains. When that happens the water runs down the road collecting more water as it goes and when water collects like that it runs faster and faster and starts to wash out the road. My job today was to knock the berm off the road edge so the rain water just washes off the road and down the hill and doesn’t collect and wash stuff out.

All the roads up here are out-sloped with no berm so there is very little road damage during heavy rains.

Here you can see where I’m knocking the outer edge off the fire trail.

De-bermed

It looks like this when I’m done and now there will be no more water damage or washouts, even when it rains real hard.

Ridge top

That didn’t take very long. After that I drove on up to the ridge top and did some fire prevention work.

This old fire trail was overgrown with brush so I dozed the brush off of it and now it’s a good fire break. That trail also goes to a real nice place to cut firewood as it’s flat and there are some real big madrone trees in the area which makes real good firewood.