Thursday August 1, 2024 Guerneville CA.
Armstrong State Park
I had an appointment with one of the head state parks guys today. I was to meet him up in the park. I drove on up there a bit before the appointed time. This park is right near where I live.
I drove into the park with Hondo and headed up to the meetup place.
The park is full of big redwood trees that survived all the early logging days in this area.
I parked here and waited for the guy to show up. That’s a state park truck but wasn’t him.
While I was waiting I noticed a group of people down by the really big tree.
There was a lady giving a spiel to the other people and sat down just as I got there. I think she was a park volunteer.
The lady is looking up to take a picture of this big tree.
She’s taking a picture of this big tree, one of the larger ones in the park.
Park guy
The park guy showed up and hopped in my rig as we were going up a road I said I’d work on and fix up for them that has very bad erosion problems. When it rains hard, the road turns into a creek washing a lot of sediment down into the park.
The road wasn’t far from where we parked. We stopped often and got out to walk and talk about what I planned to do to fix the road. There’s things you can and can’t do in a park like this as it’s a state reserve with lots of restrictions. We talked back and forth agreeing on the fixes that need to be done, working our way up the road.
Here he is checking out this culvert and the sediment that is pouring into the creek here off the road.
We stopped here and I explained what I’d need to do to try to make the narrow spot wider and easier for a fire truck to get by as he said he’d like the road to be able to be used by CAL Fire Trucks.
We came to an agreement on what I’d need to do to fix this road up and stop all the erosion and make it so a CAL fire truck could get up the road. That’s a tall request considering just how bad this road is, but I think I have the knowledge to do it. I said I’d do it for free, just make me a volunteer ranger. He gave me a junior ranger badge. :O)
Cousin’s place
From there we drove up to my cousin’s place to see how the fire prevention was coming along. They were waiting for the county fire inspector to arrive and hopefully sign off on their prevention work. The fire prevention guy showed up so we left.
I wanted to show the park guy my cousin’s property’s roads as the park is working to acquire her place and I’d fixed all their erosion problems last winter.
We drove around and I showed the guy what I’d done to all her roads so there is no erosion on them. We had a nice ride and then we stopped at my cousin’s place again to see how the inspection worked out. Did they pass. We could tell from their smiles that it did pass. We sat down and visited with them for a spell.
Eventually we headed on back to the guy’s car and agreed that was a very productive day.
I plan to do the work on this road after it rains a few times to get moisture in the ground so it packs well.
Nice day.
