Day 121 - Trail Time

 After he cleared this area, we went to work on the trail. While my sawyer friends and I had flagged a path and cleared what we felt would be the most troublesome areas, I was a bit worried that it might not go as well as planned. My farmer friend assured me to walk the path and he would follow right behind. He didn't anticipate any issues. Knowing the power of this machine much better than I ever could, I trusted him.

He was right.

It was quite a sight to see. Though much of the trail would be in open land with easy to mow down grasses, a portion of the trail was wooded. The path I had tried to clear was mostly wide enough for the brush hogger to slip through. But, in a few twists and turns along the trail, I had missed an errant young tree or fallen log. When I would turn around and give him a look of uncertainty, he returned a look of “let this bad boy do what it is intended to do.” He plowed through any obstacle with easy crushing, shredding, and/or disposing of anything unfortunate enough to be in the path of destruction.

We kept walking and clearing until we reached the ditches. Because I hadn't yet created a bridge over troubled waters, he had to turn around and see the newly-cleared trail from a different perspective. We went back until we reached a point where we took a turn back towards the house and mowed a new path through the cemetery of dead ash trees and through the field of dying reed canary grass. This path eventually ended up intersecting previously mowed trail at the culvert. This area was the border between what will hopefully be the prairie and restored wetland.

If the trail path was photographed from above, besides a few twists and turns and a spur trail leading to the culvert, it would probably look like a squashed oval with a squiggly line through the middle.

I was happy the trail was made and excited about how we could add to it. However, its creation revealed a few new necessary tasks.