I haven’t had time to work on the old dirt road for some time now, so today I got after it.
But first I had to fuel up Skiddy.
Ditching the road
I worked on this part of the road and worked my way down it. My purpose today was to improve the ditch on the right as it was above the road. A ditch that is above a road is more prown to wash out in heavy rain storms and needs a lot of maintenance after each rain storm which is a lot of work and can do a lot of erosion damage. I didn’t get a picture before I started. I put the dirt on the left side of the road as it had a lots of out- slope so there was plenty of room for the extra dirt.
As you can see in this picture, the ditch is now below the road surface and has a nice gentle slope into the ditch, which is much better and much less likely to wash out.
I don’t really like ditches, but sometimes they are necessary as there are a lot of springs that pop out of these hills when it rains hard.
I continued on down the road ditching as I went. The skidder is good at this as it turns on a dime/road so I just scoop as I go and work on down the road.
I worked the ditch on down around this hair-pin turn before the ditch went off the road and hill.
This is what the road looked like when I was done. A nice ditch and the left side of the road was also greatly improved which widened out the road a lot.
Every time I do something like this, I’m closer to being done on the road and the road gets that much better.
I had an appointment at 11 this morning to meet up with the state park guys to review my road work and look at some state park property by our property.
I rode on up through the state park heading up this road.
It’s a rather nice road on up through the big redwood trees
I continued on up the road to our meeting place.
Meet up
We met in the theater parking lot and hopped in my side by side to check out the old road I repaired and more. These are some of the head guys in our area which I have known for some time now. They let me get away with a lot because I’m always fixing stuff up and improving things and stopping erosion problem which I do at no charge.
Old road inspection
We headed out and reviewed the old dirt road I fixed up for them and the neighbors. I did all the work for free as a volunteer.
They were happy with all the work and gave me some gold stars for the good work. Part of what I did was to show the neighbors that live back in the hills that use this road how to do a dirt road right so it doesn’t wash out and only needs very low maintenance work and doesn’t cause erosion problems.
When I first started all the neighbors were against me doing the work and thought I’d just make the road worse than it already was. No one one smiled or waved at me at first. I tried to talk with them about it but no one wanted to listen to me.
Show them
I decided the only way to convince them that I knew how to do it right was to show them, so that’s what I did and eventually they started to wave and smile and even stopped to shoot the bull with me.
I did show them which was part of the reason I did this to start with so they would change their ways on their roads and learn to do them right so they weren’t all washing out and taking a lot of maintenance and causing a lot of erosion. Every time it rained they were out after the rain, cleaning out ditches and plugged up culverts.
And now I can see that they are all starting to practice the way I do dirt roads in the steep hills in our area. That is a win, win for everyone.
Fire access
Any way after we inspected the road, we rode on over to our property where I gave them a tour of our place and I showed them some trails I reopened on the park property for fire protection which they were also happy with as the trails are helpful during forest fires so fire fighters can get into the deep forest to work on putting out the forest fires.
It was all good
I’ve been working up here in this forest repairing roads and trails erosion problems and improving fire fighting access which has paid off. I’ve been working on this for a number of years now and keeping quiet about it, so no one would object.
It was a good meeting with them. I returned them to their trucks were we met and got lots of thanks which is always a good thing.
Phone problem
I also got a response from my cell phone provider where I finally got a good answer.
They said to take the battery out of the phone for a bit and then put it back, but that can’t be done easily on my phone. If that didn’t work, they said to ask for a new sim for it, which I think should solve the problem once and for all.
Nice day.
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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.
