Wednesday February 5, 2025 Guerneville CA.
Forest ride
I heard Barry outside today in his truck. That usually means he came over to go for a dirt bike ride up in the forest.
I had to jump out of bed and get it going if I wanted to go. Tom came by and they shot the bull for a bit while I got it going.
Waterfall
Barry wanted to go up and check out the waterfall with all the rain we had yesterday, it should be flowing real good.
But first, we had to move this tree off the trail to the waterfall.
New saws
Tom gave Barry and I each a new saw to carry on our dirt bikes, for Christmas, which was handy as we had to cut this log in half to get by it.
Barry was real happy as he’d been sawing for about two minutes and was almost through the log.
He was able to get by the log, but just barely.
Waterfall
We made it to the waterfall and parked just below it.
Real lush right now here. Nice green moss on this big fir tree’s roots, exposed in the creek from the waterfall, just above this.
It was a pretty heavy rain yesterday. This is the most flow we’ve seen in the falls, so far.
Big Salamander
Barry spotted this Giant Pacific Salamander. I’ve seen them get up to around ten inches. This one is about six inches long. They are not seen very often as they spend most of their time under things or in the ground.
Shower
We took off and rode around a bit. A rain shower developed and dropped rain drops on me for about forty five minutes. The rain was real light, but it was making me cold. I was ready to go home, but it finally stopped so we continued our ride.
We were headed to the top of the hill where we take breaks often. On the way we had to clear a way around this fallen tree. Barry was able to move enough of the fallen tree for us to ride on by it.
This was our view at the top. We sat there for quite some time when Barry said we better get going or he wouldn’t be able to get up, so we took off for some more riding around the hills.There was lots of water popping out and running down the hillside from yesterdays rain. Everything was still real wet.
Eventually we made it over to the Guerneville overlook. Korbel’s grape field was a bit flooded, but the town of Guerneville wasn’t flooded, although, it can flood. I canoed down main street of town in 1964.
We eventually made it back to my place where Barry took off for his place. Nice ride today.
Checking out the dirt road storm damage
I still had a couple hours left in the day before it got dark , so I rode my side by side up to check out the storm damage on the dirt road I’ve been trying to improve. I wanted to check out the damage while the storm water was still flowing to figure out how to make improvements on the road to stop damage from big rain storms.
Most of the road bed was in real good shape and held up well to the heavy rain.
But there were a couple of spots that didn’t fair as well, but even that damage didn’t really mess up the road bed that bad. I studied the situation and made some plans to improve this area so this doesn’t happen again. I just need to get a few dry days so I can work my Skidder on the road so it doesn’t tear everything up too much from the road being real wet.
I used my shovel to put this water back in the ditch and will fix this spot up better with the Skidder when things dry out a bit. We are supposed to get another day of rain tomorrow and we get some dry days before it rains some more.
All in all, the road held up pretty well considering the amount of rain we got on it, which is a good thing.
And the heavy rains are what is needed to show me what needs to be improved, so actually it was a real good thing as it rained hard enough to show me the worst.
After checking the road out, I’m confident I can improve the road quite a bit to make a better road. This is actually a tough place for a road to go through as when it rains, water pops out of the hill almost everywhere in abundance.
I headed on home and made it just before dark.
Nice day.
