So yesterday the man said to me, I have a new route to the claim, and I want you to help me take another load up tomorrow. This new route has all of the steep stuff straight up at the beginning, and then it's mostly level from then on out. And it's shorter than the regular one. Oh, and the last quarter mile is backwards.
Wait, what?
There I was, against my better judgement, riding shotgun while we traveled in reverse, backing up a steep, wooded path (NOT A ROAD), with a half dozen pine trees trying to give the truck a little mountain pin-striping. I was mostly calm through this part, even when pine needles and twigs came flying in my open window. Soon we were stopped, and I was about to find out what "all the steep is at the beginning" meant.
On my first trip up, I only had to carry up some coiled plastic pipe that would form the french drain under the cabin. It couldn't have weighed more than two pounds, but it was big and bulky, and it stopped being fun to carry about halfway through the 1/3 mile of straight up hike. Okay, not straight up. Maybe a 30 degree climb for most of it, at worst 40 degrees. I had to stop, and I mean stop a lot. Even Murray made it look like effort, getting up this vigorous climb. Eventually I found a flat rock on the ground big enough for me to sit semi-comfortably, and I rested for about three minutes. By the time I stood, I was totally lost. This was probably the second time to that point, with easily ten more times I could honestly say I had no idea where I was or which way I should move before the day was over. I saw Mr S-P disappearing in the distance, but he had started tying orange plastic strips to the trees by then, so I had a better than nil chance of finding my way up and back. There were not nearly enough flags, and I still managed to turn in the wrong direction over and over and over. And it didn't take me three more minutes of walking for my entire body to run out of adenosine triphosphate, and without ATP, there was no chance of solid muscle control. It took me at least 30 minutes of baby steps, where what I was really doing was managing to stand and then lean slightly uphill long enough to stagger six inches at a time, to reach the campsite. I asked for a chair and I drank most of one of those giant cans of tea that tastes like it's 90% honey before I finally starting coming out of my stupor.
Eventually I was assigned tasks, like removing nuts and washers from bolts so that the sub-subfloor steel could get slipped over the bolts and then held in place. The cabin will essentially be skinned in steel so that critters and fire have a much higher barrier to cross to get in. And yes, as the above paragraph implies, in order to have a cabin at the mining claim, we have to hand carry it up a hill, each and every ounce of it. Thank goodness we don't have to haul it all at once.
(Unlike most of my posts, text follows images.)
I knew we would be working hard, and I loaded us up on good carbs: cassava flour crepes filled with Nutella, blueberries, honey, and whipped cream. Still not enough to keep my muscles powered.
My view back down the hill from the spot where I rested and got well and truly lost (the second time, definitely not the last.)
This is the aspen family that lines one side of the cabin site.
This will be the view from the deck of the cabin, once we get that far.
Was I digging the beginings of the trench for the french drain while sitting on the ground? Of course I was! I was too tired to stand and lean over a short-handle shovel.
I was filtering out rocks to use around the drain. These were not rocks, I quickly recognized. They appeared to be some sort of fungus. What kind of fungus looks like new potatoes on the outside and moldy pink insulation on the inside?
I'm always on the lookout for a new cover photo. This one has promise.
As does this.
Or maybe this. They're golden peas on the edge of the aspen meadow, where the baby trees are filling in open spaces.
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