Nothing about this place is manicured or finished to any extent beyond functional readiness. This is the case most significantly in its paths and roads. I rarely walk the same path so there are none marking the ground except the one hundred feet of path between the house and the power shed and a little more than four hundred feet of pre-existing dirt and gravel driveway from county road to the house. About three thousand feet of old logging road persists, but I didn't build that scar on the land. Some idiot logging company operator cut it sloppily up the south slope and logged what he thought was this property before it was sold but which in fact was the adjacent property because he didn't know how to strike a straight line through forested land between surveyed corner markers and he foolishly trusted old fence lines which were also very crooked and incorrectly placed. So there is about twenty-five acres of untouched, dense, old conifer forest still growing on the slope across the creek to enjoy long, lingering walks through. It's also the path I take to access national forestlands.
I needed a way to drive the truck up into it. Constructing a low water crossing this week is the most deeply cut section of roadway I have built here. It's only a few feet of cut mere inches deep at the creek and some flat field stones relocated for traction where the usually thin, shallow stream flows. But it's not too bad, the field stones do not impede water flow at all and it's a scar nature will gradually hide the worst of within a year or two without destroying its functionality. I'll certainly have to do annual maintenance to keep it passable.
Eventually I'll set a culvert pipe and cover it with more substantial crossing roadbed, but I'm in no rush to do that. It will no doubt be expensive and someone will have to come up here with a bulldozer or backhoe to install and push earth around. I'd rather no one come up here while SARS-CoV-2 is still spreading unabated across the nation with little sign of halting.
