After our rest day, we were up bright and early to start our commute to work. We needed to walk about 7 tens of a mile to the end of our previous work where we had stashed the tools.
Before images….
After. You can now just make out the tread of the trail and a careful eye can see the trail corridor with Melodie standing in the distance. Yes, there is much more standing downfall to come in the years ahead.
Kjeil, Mary, and Spike cut out one of the thousands of logs on this trail. Spike is the name of this crosscut saw and he is the best in the ITA.
Mary cuts with a smile as Pam bumps past to the next obstacle. Generally we work in groups of two or three with two crosscut teams and a couple folks working ahead defining the trail and using smaller saws and loppers to prep the larger trees to be cut. After nearly a week together now, we were turning into a well oiled trail clearing machine.
Lunch time! About noon every day, the heat of the day sets in and things begin to slow down to a crawl.
Tools of the trade.
At the end of the day Kjeil (Pronounced “Shell”) takes a moment to reflect. He was tired, dirty, hot, hungry, and had been buzzed by flies all day but like all of us, Kjeil seemed to have a peaceful easy feeling. Extended time in the wilderness begins to take on a daily rhythm, a simple beat of self sufficiency, personal hygiene, eating, hydrating, resting, working…… It really boils life down to basic elements and all the distractions of the outside world melt away and seem so irrelevant. Our small society of 7 people is starting to sort itself out. We are all fiercely independent folks and yet also reliant on each other. It was a fascinating social experiment.
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