Bob's Eyes

Friday January 26, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Road check out

I thought I’d go work on a trail today, but first I thought a ride would be good. I had a road I wanted to check out over on a neighbor’s place to see what condition it was in.

I rode on over to the road and right away ran into this downed tree, so I walked down the road to check it out.

The road wasn’t too bad but there were some downed trees on it. Chainsaw work.

This creek crossing that I fixed up a few years back was holding up well.

Not far up the road from the creek crossing I ran into this slide that was partially blocking the road.

On the way back up the road, I went by this rotten log with these mushrooms growing on it.

I made it back to the bike parked at oil can flat.

Big tree

Then I headed over to where the trail was that I wanted to work on. I looked at this tree the other day. Today I wanted to see what it would take to clear this big tree off the road.

After checking it out, I think I could carefully nibble away at it and get it off the road, if I take my time at it. Tom had been by it the other day and at least cut enough out of it to get by on the bike, once I moved some stuff.

Once I got the path under it cleared, I drove on through and stopped at this spring for a drink of water as that big tree had tired me out.

I made it to the overlook where the trail I wanted to work on started and had a good break before getting started on that trail.

I worked on that trail until my hands started to get blistered. I’d forgotten my gloves back at the bike so I walked on back and got them off the bike where I’d forgotten them.

I got those gloves just in time before any real serious blisters developed. I worked on the trail for a couple of hours and then went back to the bike and sat in the chair at the overlook for a good break, before heading for home.

Lush trail

I took this trail on way back. It’s a very lush trail with lots of big green ferns.

Once home, there was still enough light left in the day to do some chair hopping with the chickens.

Nice day.

Thursday January 25, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Replacing power pole

Today, Tom and I were going to replace our rental’s power pole that was rotten.

Tom had contacted the power company to disconnect the power lines and we had to dig up and take out the rotten pole.

Tome and the power guy had started the job before I got it going and when I went on over there, they had the job started and part of the old power pole cut off. Now we had to dig up the lower part of the rotten power pole and get it out of the ground so we could put the new pole that is laying on the ground into the hole.

Darn roots

The dirt was soft and easy to dig but the redwood tree roots really slowed us down. We dug almost down to the bottom of the old rotten pole before we could pull it out with his tractor. Fortunately, the rotten pole came out without breaking it off which made things much easer.

The power guy came back early on and helped out a lot doing some of our work voluntarily which helped make the job much easier. He was on emergency standby in our area so was available as long as there weren’t any emergencies like someone crashing their car into one of their poles. The power company was only responsible for unhooking their wires at the top of the pole and re-hooking them up once we had the new pole in the ground and our hardware hooked back up.

His extra help all made the job relatively easy except for cutting the redwood roots out of the way which is hard to do in a deep hole.

Tom’s directing the power guy to get the pole up straight so we could set it.

When we were almost done, Tom realized he’d talked with this guy before at the ocean as they both do a lot of ocean fishing so at the end they had a good fishing bull session as fishermen do. :O)

It was good to get that job crossed off the list.

I picked up our tools and went on home.

While chair hopping around my yard, I noticed these daffodil plants were almost ready to bloom. Our last rains had been warm ones and really pushed up spring.