More stone work

The burnt skeleton of a buck fence, climbing up the hill to Fremont Lake

Fremont Lake: Sylvan Bay

Fremont Lake: Sandy Beach

I ran up Soda Lake road with my brother this morning.  Most of the pictures in this post are his.  I am buying a Samsung 5 when I get back to Denver.  We ran almost to Soda Lake and then took a right on an old 2 track and ran up to the West side of Fremont lake.  The last mile or so to get to the top was grueling and extremely steep.  This part of the hill has burned in the last decade or so but I was not around when it happened.  The extent of the fire is easily visible from the opposite side of the lake.  My mother and I discussed the incredible fields of bright yellow flowers at some length and were able to work together to mine our memory banks without having to resort to the internet.  It is Mule's Ear Flower,  Wyethia amplexicaulis.

During our entire run, a large tanker truck was filling from a canal off Pine Creek and then dumping somewhere near Soda Lake.  We saw many horses, so perhaps it was filling a water source for them.

After the run my mother served a simple blue collar lunch for us with baked beans, egg-salad sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, potato salad, coleslaw, and coffee.  As my nephew Kian asks: "What's for lunch dessert?"  The answer today was homemade apple crisp with granny smith apples and vanilla ice cream on the side.

After lunch I went down to the local Forest Service office and pulled a "post and pole" permit to allow us to cut materials for the next construction project.  Lil and I had gone to a local timber place a few days ago to purchase materials, but they were so expensive I think I will harvest them myself.  One of the wire enclosures blew over and took a newly planted sapling with it, but no damage was incurred.  I cut points into a couple of leftover pieces of lath with the reciprocating saw and Patrick and Mom staked the wire.

The dodge suspension fully depressed

Patrick and I went out and filled up another truckload of rock.  My friend Matty in Denver helped me put in custom 3000 pound rear leaf spring suspension for heavy loads a couple years back, but we definitely overloaded them today.  I am thinking we are at about 20 thousand pounds laid so far in the dry river bed.  This last batch is beautiful with a lot of black and multi-colored lichen.  We dumped it, but will use TomTom to move it into position another day.

I feel like many of my posts declare that the pergola is complete.  My brother and I excavated to lay flagstone underneath it yesterday and Lilly laid all of it with dirt and sand.  Kian build an expert cairn as an expression piece and also covered up the grey concrete footers with rocks.  I will no longer make the mistake of declaring the pergola finished.  Instead may I say that another iteration in pergola work has been performed.

Newest instantiation of the pergola, rock covering the footers, flagstone and cairn

The final project of the day was to scout out a place to log materials for the next building project.  We went up skyline drive and drove and hiked down many forest roads to try to find the perfect place.  Eventually we made it to Elkhart Park and the main road ended.  Kian enjoyed playing in the snow at the top.

Kian at Elkhart Park overlook winding up to send out the pitch at Patrick - photo cred to Patrick

And a perfect release!

On the way out I was a bit dejected that we hadn't found a very good spot to fill our lumber manifest.  Then I saw a place where my friend Sean Storrud and I used to go climbing.  We also once gathered old lodge poles to use as quarterstaves.  Sure enough, when we pulled into this part of the forest to scout, we saw that this was the perfect place to gather materials for the project.  In addition, I hope to gather a lot of forest materials for custom furniture my mother would like us to build.  Logging tomorrow?