Day 115

Trailbuilding is hard work, especially if you don't have a great deal of equipment. While my push mower is nice to get a path started, maintaining that path would be much tougher when the trail moved into the forested parts of our property. These woods are also overgrown with reed canary grass and full of fallen trees. There was plenty of work that needed to be done to improve the area. But first, we needed a better way to actually gain access to these areas. 

To help with my trail planning, I walked the wooded area with my pink flagging tape. Even though I tried to design my route around the treacherous portions of the woods, running into fallen trees was inevitable. I was happy to have a few Ice Age Trail sawyer friends join me on the land to help clear the path one summer evening. My neighbor also joined in with his tractor, so I assigned him the task of taking old railroad ties from our crumbling retaining wall to a few spots along the ditches. I hope to eventually use these as bases for the bridges over the ditches someday.

While he trekked around the land on his tractor, my two sawyer friends removed some troubling trees and cut them into friendly sizes so that I could get my workout in and throw them off the main path. I was very appreciative to learn from them simply by observing them. Even though this portion of the trail was still in its infancy, having some trees removed did start making it feel more like a trail than the random pink flag path decorating the woods ever could. We started clearing wood on one end of the forest and successfully made it out of the other side just as the sun started saying goodbye for the evening. 

As my sawyer friends packed up their equipment and started heading back to their cars, I received a phone call from my neighbor asking me to come back to where we had started working a few hours earlier. 

When I got there, a few important pieces of information made me realize the night was far from over.