Everybody loves bacon. Even vegetarians love bacon. I love bacon, too. But knowing what I do about factory farming practices, I never buy bacon from the store anymore. I last made bacon when we lived in Northern California, in about 1997, when we raised our first pig and butchered it ourselves. It was amazingly delicious; it was as if I had never actually eaten real pork before in my whole life.

We raised pigs again after we moved back to Washington, in about 2003 or so. We had them butchered by pros, and sold some to friends. Recently I defrosted and cleaned out our older freezer, and discovered a wealth of frozen meat all encased in ice inside. Amongst these treasures were several pieces of pork belly from 2003 that we never got around to making into bacon. Amazingly, it had no freezer burn, or any other issues from being frozen for over 6 years.


Bacon, step 1

So, figuring I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, I thawed some of it out and set to work. Like a lot of cured and smoked meat products, bacon is so easy to make that it’s embarrassing. I start with the pork belly, and trim it to fit into my largest glass pyrex casserole dish.


Bacon, step 2

Make up a mixture of half canning salt and half brown sugar, layer some in the bottom of the dish, put the pork in, layer more sugar/salt mixture on top and rub it into the edges well. Cover and refrigerate. After a day or so, pull it out and repack it with fresh mixture, and turn it over. After another day or so, do the same thing. Or, do what I did, and space out and leave it in the fridge for a while longer. Like, maybe a couple of months?

Whichever path you choose, when you are ready to smoke it, it will be a good idea to slice off a piece, cook it up and taste it to see how salty it is. After letting mine cure for two months, I ended up soaking it in water for about 24 hours, changing the water once, to get the saltiness under control.


Bacon, step 3

Once you’re comfortable with the salt level, set it up in the top rack of your electric smoker, and go get yourself some fruitwood chips. What I do is go out to one of the apple trees here, prune off a bunch of extra twigs and small shoots and chop them up into bits with the pruning shears.


Bacon, step 4

I smoked this particular bacon for about 10 hours, using up about 7 pans of chips in the process. Once it’s smoked to your liking, pull it out, cool it, wrap it in paper and put it in the fridge. Now you get to slice off pieces however thick you want, and it will taste way better than any bacon you’ll ever get from the store.

Told you it was easy!


Bacon


cat and water

Ah, March. In like a lamb, and out like a lion, at least this year, anyway!

March is one of my favorite months, for a lot of different reasons. For one, my birthday is in March, and has almost always been accompanied by blooming daffodils, and, by the end of the month, trilliums are also blooming in the woods.


trillium

And for another, it is when I usually start fishing for springers. I have made a tradition out of starting on my birthday, but I usually don’t see much action until the end of the month, or later. I got my first strike while trolling yesterday, but it didn’t stick, and that was all the springer excitement I’ve had so far this year.


Dynamic Water training

It’s also when I start getting the first kayaking work of the year. I usually have a custom tour of some kind in early March, and this year was no exception. Andrew had someone sign up for one of his Gray’s Bay tours, but his broken foot was still healing, so I took the tour. That turned out to be the same weekend that Jukka Linnonmaa from Kayak Finland came to visit, so he came along with us. It was a beautiful day, as was much of early March, and we made it all the way to Knappton and back.


Jukka and Me at Altoona

Jukka stayed with Don and Kitty at the Inn at Crippen Creek Farm, and showed us slides of some of his paddling travels after dinner. He’s been paddling in a lot of the places that I want to go paddling, like Japan!

The next day he asked to borrow a kayak, and since my other plans for the day had fallen through, I decided to go paddling with him, too; he and Andrew and I paddled to Altoona and back, about 20 miles. On a beach downriver from Skamokawa, Andrew made an incredible find: fossilized teeth and a piece of jawbone from a Pleistocene era horse of some kind. Besides bringing us this amazing good luck, Jukka was great company, gifted me a beautiful Finnish knife, and sold Andrew one of his digital cameras and a waterproof case for a song.


fossil teeth and jawbone

Columbia River Kayaking also held a leadership scenarios training day for Josh and Katie this month, has been busy getting ready for the first of this year’s Exploritas programs, which starts this coming Sunday, and we cleaned up the paddle center in preparation for the upcoming kayaking season, even as we await some kind of news from the bank regarding the future of Skamokawa Center.


high tide at number 35

In between all of this, and occasionally getting up before dawn to go fishing, I overhauled the home website for Red Alder Ranch, cleaning up the appearance a bit, and getting rid of some old, irrelevant pages. I still need to finish updating the links page, but it looks better than it did!


Springer fishing sunrise

I’ve also been engaged in some spring cleaning on a larger, and less “virtual” scale, clearing away some old trucks and boats that are no longer useful, and endeavoring to clean up my shop so that I can work on a couple of boatbuilding projects that have been brewing for a while. Stay tuned for that.

My old, mostly faithful Toyota 4×4 left today, on its way to a new life with a group of young Mexican guys down in Portland. It was actually a little bit sad. That truck was my daily driver for years when I lived down in California. But it’s been sitting in my pasture since 2004, with a jammed up timing chain, and I finally admitted to myself that I really wasn’t going to get around to rebuilding the engine anytime soon, and it was time to move it on.


Toyota truck in the weeds

As if by magic, almost as soon as I started clearing out old projects and cleaning the place up a bit, my good friend Scott emailed to say that he wanted to give me his ’68 GMC pickup, as it was time for him to move it on. What can I say? Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess. I’ll be going up to Seattle sometime soon to pick it up.


Spring Chinook nigiri

Levi did catch a springer the other day, and gave me a piece of it. I cooked some up for dinner one night, but saved the rest of it for some springer nigiri. It was as delicious as it looks!

Another long break in between blog entries…. I guess I haven’t been doing anything interesting enough to blog about!

After the end of hunting season, the days seemed to get shorter very quickly, and I kind of went into hibernation mode, feeding wood into the stove, reading, working on next year’s schedule, and conserving energy.


sunset

I stopped off at Solstice Forge’s annual Hammer-In party in November, but I forgot to bring along the project I wanted to work on, so I just visited, and watched other people beating on hot metal instead.


red hot

December brought an unusual hard, cold freeze to Skamokawa, with the thermometer reading about 9 degrees F every morning for over a week. I kept the taps running day and night, and even at that I had the water partially freeze up one night. I lucked out and got it thawed and flowing again pretty quickly, and didn’t suffer any broken pipes.


pilings

The Skamokawa Center wasn’t so lucky though, and pipes broke in most of the buildings there. At least this time, I didn’t have to fix it all.


ice on the window

After about a week and a half of subfreezing weather, a Pacific front moved in and warmed everything up. So far, we’ve not had a repeat of the snow event from last year. I never even got around to putting the studded tires on the car this year; even the K-M Mountain pass has been clear and bare all winter.


change in the weather

I went out for the Christmas bird count again, on a very cold and windy day. Not very many birds wanted to be out in that weather, but I did my part, and went out to Jim Crow Sands (yes, it is really named that, officially…) and found a pair of Horned Larks for the count.


sandy island in the river

Last month we had a little Burns Dinner at my brother’s house in Seattle. He ordered a haggis from the Swinery, a meat shop in West Seattle and made up a delicious lamb stew, and the traditional neeps and tatties to go with it. Guests each brought a bottle of single malt scotch, and Paul even brought two! Next year we’re thinking of doing it a little bigger, but my brother went so far this year as to recite the “Address to a Haggis” with a reasonable good Scottish accent.


single malts

After a very long period of uncertainty, Skamokawa Center was finally foreclosed on by the bank this month, and now the bank is looking to sell it off as quickly as possible. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a long line of potential buyers waiting for their chance to own a quaint little inn and cafe out in the middle of nowhere. We’re hoping that in the meantime, Columbia River Kayaking can continue to rent and operate the paddle center like we did last year.


kayaks and sky

I have always been interested in machining technology. My very first job after high school was working in a machine shop, but I got laid off in the slow winter, and never got back around to that career path. But every now and then I’ll pick up a book or a magazine about machining and read it.

The lathe was the first basic tool of the industrial revolution; with it, you can make all of the other tools: milling machines, shapers, drill presses, etc.

One of my brother’s friends had taken an old lathe and some miscellaneous tools as payment on a debt, and he recently offered it all to my brother and I, so we purchased this 1936 South Bend Model 415 lathe, and a few boxes of tooling and other junk, along with a cheap Chinese drill press converted to milling service. I welded up a heavy steel table for it, and, a few hours at a time, I’ve been cleaning it up, researching its operation and hopefully I’ll be able to turn some metal in it soon.


South Bend lathe model 415


young hemlock

When I was a kid, I was really, really into fishing, and somewhere along the way, I picked up subscriptions to Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines. I read the hunting articles with gusto as well, and used to read all the outfitters’ ads in the back, imagining what it would be like to hunt javelina in Arizona or moose in Alaska. But hunting was not something that my family did, not my parents’ generation anyway.

My dad had an old Winchester model 94 rifle, chambered in obsolete .32 Winchester Special. When I finally got to be a teenager, and had been through hunter safety training at Boy Scout camp (in direct contravention to my mother’s orders to stay away from the rifle range), I was allowed to at least handle this rifle, and I used to take it out of the cabinet and clean it. It was in pretty rough shape though, with lots of copper fouling and crud. I don’t think it had been cleaned since sometime in the early fifties, if then.

But I never knew any adults who hunted, and so it pretty much slipped off the list of things to think about. When I lived in Northern California, one year I went looking for a wild turkey for Thanksgiving, having read a small book about turkey hunting. They were everywhere in that neighborhood, but I wasn’t able to find the flock that day until I had tramped all over about 300 acres of land. When I finally came across them, there they were, on the other side of the fence where my hunting permission stopped.


pack and rifle

When I moved back to Washington, I started fishing again, and pretty much had to teach myself how to catch salmon, since that was also something that I didn’t learn from my family. I had a pretty frustrating first season, first not hooking any fish, and then hooking and losing them, but I eventually figured it out. For the past three years, I’ve been talking about getting a hunting license, too, since I live surrounded by elk, deer, grouse and bear, but I would always get caught up in other activities and, since hunting would require a steep learning curve, I would let it slide.

This year, though, I finally decided it was time to do something about it. I dragged out some of my brother’s rifles that are stored here, and ended up selecting the SVD Tiger/Dragunov as the closest thing to an elk rifle that I had, and I went and bought a license, my first one ever. I spent a few days during early deer season scouting around behind my land here, and the first day I went out, I jumped a small buck in thick alder and brush. He was up and out of there so fast I didn’t have a chance to shoot. I spent the next couple of days trying to find him again, but with no luck.


timbered slope

When elk season started, I went over to the forest behind Andrew’s place, where there was a lot more elk sign than at my place. I spent several days, getting into the woods at dawn and hunting until afternoon. I had a great time, and covered a lot of territory that I had never seen before, including a nice stand of second growth timber, which is not all that common around here anymore.

I quickly figured out a few things, mostly about noise, and moving quietly. Almost all my clothes are noisy, my pack is noisy, and especially the rifle is noisy. The safety is very stiff and loud, the plastic stock makes loud noises every time it brushes up against anything, and it is covered with sharp, angular protrusions that are uncomfortable against your body and tend to snag up on every little twig or branch.

I ended up putting this rifle away, cleaning out the piggy bank and buying a “proper” deer rifle, a used Marlin 336 lever action rifle, in .35 Remington. It is SO much nicer to carry!

For days of elk hunting, these old bones were as close as I got to an elk.


elk vertabrae

One of the best things I got out of hunting this year though, was learning the area behind my land at a level of detail that I did not know before. I found two different ways to walk up to the next network of logging roads on the ridge that lead all the way over to Oatfield road, where Andrew and Audrey and the Speranzas live, and was able to drive (just barely!) from that side all the way up to the top, where the ridge is only about as wide as the road and you could look into Middle valley on one side and over to the marsh below my house on the other side. GPS waypoints and Google maps are awesome tools.

On the last day of elk season, I was hunting in the clearcut behind my place, and jumped a blacktail buck out of his bed. He walked about 30 yards up towards the timber, and I stopped, sat down and pulled out the binocs. He stopped about 100 yards away, and stood there, perfectly broadside to me, and just watched me. If only it was deer season!

I came back for the four days of late deer season, looking for this buck every day, and never saw him again. The weather was rainy and sometimes very windy, and the deer stayed hunkered down and out of sight. The day after deer season closed, I went up to the clearcut again, and found the buck’s fresh tracks going right up the middle of one of the logging roads, right out in the open. They’re not dumb, those deer.


do you see the buck?


seeds!

Well, here it is, almost Halloween and more than three months since I last posted anything! It has been a busy season, and I just haven’t felt very organized about blogging and posting pictures to Flickr. I have to admit, Facebook has absorbed a good deal of the time and energy I have for blogging and social interaction on the computer, but I am not ready to give up the blog just yet. So here’s a somewhat long update.


Pelicans at Buoy Ten

Salmon fishing this year was incredible. Almost every time I went out, everyone on the boat limited. One day Brian and Lisa and I went out in the ocean and kept six fish in under an hour, and put back five natives. It was about as hot as I have ever seen it. I smoked and froze a bunch of fish and when it got to be too much fish to have time to smoke it all, I vacuum packed and froze fillets instead.


Coho

In August, we held the Loco Roundup kayak symposium on Puget Island again. After a whole lot of last minute wrangling and logging approved training hours, I took the BCU four star sea kayak assessment, and passed. This is something I have been trying to get done for almost a year and a half, and it finally came together this summer. It was a two day, on the water assessment, leading a group of paddlers near Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River. I was so focused on the task at hand, that it was only later I realized that I hadn’t taken a single picture for two days. But I did take pictures during the training sessions, and that’s where this picture is from.


Cape D

I also passed the three star canoe assessment, and took the new Level Two coaching class. With luck, a lot of hours practicing, and piles of paperwork, I might be ready to take that assessment next spring. I helped Ginni with two BCU assessments this year, one of them was a new two star with canoes and one was a three star assessment with candidates from three countries, speaking two different languages.


Canoe fun


navigation project

At the end of August, Shannon and I went to see Al Green at the Edgefield. Does Al Green still have it goin’ on? Yes, he certainly does…


Al Green at the Edgefield, August 28, 2009

Near the beginning of September, Columbia River Kayaking got the news that we will be allowed to run our own Elderhostel programs here next year, without the need for a middleman like we had this year. This will allow us more direct control over our interaction with Elderhostel and we will keep more money in the bank at the end of the day as well.


pilings and kayaks

Oh, and Elderhostel, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided this year to change the name that it has spent 25 years building brand recognition around. Apparently there is a sizable piece of the over-55 demographic that found the word “elder” to be offensive. The new name, which I might never get used to, is Exploritas. I’m sure there were many interesting committee meetings involved in that decision…


smooth water

Skamokawa Center continues to languish in limbo, though. There had been a foreclosure auction scheduled for October 2nd, but the day before, Greg and his LLCs filed for bankruptcy, which automatically shielded him from the foreclosure action. The auction was rescheduled for Friday, November 13th. Heh, heh, heh….


Sunrise in Port Townsend

The well ran dry this year. There was not enough August rain to keep it full for the whole dry season. I carried water for about three weeks, which isn’t too bad compared to other years. One year I hauled water for something like 80 days. Unfortunately, it always runs out just at the time that there are fish to clean and process…


the well

It was a great year for food preservation. For the first time in a long time, I was very organized and persistent in keeping on top of all the food that was showing up this year. Besides fish, berries were also in abundance and I made a lot of jam. And when Ginni left for Mexico, we had a big garden gleaning day at the farm and hauled away bags and boxes of produce, including an IKEA bag half full of jalapenos. I pickled a bunch of those, and Shannon and I made some jalapeno relish, and I have a big tray of roasted ones sitting here that I need to finish putting in jars tonight. I still have to get in the rest of the apples from here and Ginni’s place.


blackberries!

All of that food, plus the fact that I’ve been really broke this year led me to break ground on a new garden. I haven’t been willing to go all out with gardening here, since the water is not all that reliable, but I have been reading Steve Solomon’s “Gardening When it Counts” and setting this garden up with his minimalist irrigation plan in mind. Basically, you give each plant more space, and then relentlessly weed out any competitors for the water. I borrowed Krist’s tractor and tiller attachment and tilled up a space about 40×60 feet, and then made nine, five foot wide beds out of it. I planted three beds to garlic and the rest to cover crops for now. Fencing is next.


new garden

This will be the biggest garden I’ve grown since I lived in Salmon Creek, in 2000.


garden beds

This is also the first year I have purchased a hunting license. I didn’t grow up with hunting, so I never really learned anything about it, but I have had deer and bear in my yard this fall, and there are always elk around here, too. Last year, we bought a quarter of a local steer for the freezer, and spent several hundred dollars on that. It was delicious, and it’s nice to support local folk who are growing local meat. We bought a half a hog this year from Crippen Creek Farm. But I sure would like to put an elk or a bear in the freezer, too. We’ll see how that goes. With hunting season in mind, I’ve been sifting through the armory here, looking for an adequate elk rifle. I’ve been shooting my brother’s Dragunov rifle, but I haven’t been able to set it up on a bench and sight it in properly yet. It seems to shoot a little low and to the left. My practically new Browning shotgun might actually get put to use this year, too, since grouse are abundant around the land here and they are open until the end of December.


Dragunov SVD Tiger

I should have put up more firewood this year. I did a lot of work in the woods here this summer, making tractor trails so I can access the stands of trees there. But what I pulled out in that process is still only a cord or so, and three cords is more like what I use in a season here. No doubt I will actually end up purchasing a cord or two this year. I’ll get back in there in the spring to pull out another batch of logs to inoculate with Shiitake mushrooms.


alder logs


rocks

Summer is flying by, and I’ve had little time to spend processing photos and blogging. So here’s a quick handful of pictures from this summer.

I do love fireworks, and I can get some really good ones right down the road in Cathlamet. The dog, however, does not think so highly of fireworks…


fireworks!

I went out one day and sat in the skiff for an hour in a place I had never tried fishing in before, and brought home this nice summer chinook.


early summer Chinook

Way back in April, I took Forbes magazine reporter Rebecca Ruiz out kayaking on the river here. She wrote this article that came out in the July 13 edition, and featured a few of my photos.


forbes screenshot

Raspberries have been really prolific this year, and for once, I have been staying on top of making jam as they get ripe. So far I’ve canned 18 pints of raspberry jam.


jammin'

Alice and I took a 20 mile skiff ride up to Ginni’s place on the island and back. It was fun, and since Cathlamet has a dock, we even stopped and grabbed some groceries on the way home. I love river life.


skiff ride

This is the gate to my little patch of forest. The grass gets really tall now that the sheep are gone.


gate

We got a bunch of coho salmon from the Astoria based trolling vessel “Little John”, and we smoked it.


salmon ready to smoke

Elderhostel programs have been humming along; here’s a picture of one of the intergenerational Elderhostel kids at Rocky Point.


Anna at Number 7, Gray's Bay

The feral bunnies still come in the yard and eat my kale, and dig in my beds.


backyard bunny

Wapato was a staple food for the native people here. It grows in the mud in the freshwater tidal sloughs and bays around here, and when properly cultivated and maintained, it produces an edible tuber, similar to a potato. Here’s some wapato underwater at high tide.


wapato

Chatterbox orchid (Epipactis Gigantea) grows on the abandoned pilings around here.


Chatterbox Orchid


all done

So, this is one of my other favorite things to do with salmon. Gravlax is basically cold cured salmon, and the recipe originated in Scandinavia, where so many of the interesting ways of preparing fish come from.

Start with a couple of small fillets. I usually use coho, but this year I saved a couple of fillets off of my spring chinook instead, since I couldn’t wait for coho season to have some of this delicious treat. I freeze the fillets for a few days to kill any parasites, since gravlax does not involve any cooking of the fish.

Thaw out your fillets and then rub them down with a light coat of olive oil, probably not an original Scandinavian ingredient, but what the heck. Then I usually rub them down with a little scotch whisky, but this time I used a little sake, since I am all out of good scotch. I usually grind a little bit of pepper on the fillets too.

Then mix up a cup of non-iodized canning salt and a cup of sugar, and put a thin layer of this in the bottom of a glass dish or pie pan. Lay the first fillet on this salt sugar mix, skin side down, and coat it well with more of the sugar/salt mixture. Put on a layer of thin slices of red onion. Cover that with a handful or two of fresh dill, and then another layer of onion slices.


Making Gravlax

Coat the other fillet with the sugar/salt mixture and lay that on top, skin side up, and then use the rest of the sugar/salt mixture to cover everything well. Cover it up and put the whole thing in the fridge, after admiring your work of course, and maybe having a shot or two of the scotch.


Making Gravlax

Twelve hours later, pull the dish out of the fridge. There will be a lot of brine now in the dish, from all the moisture that the salt has pulled out of the fillets. Using a spatula, turn the whole thing over, so the top fillet is now on the bottom. Use a spoon and pour the brine all over the whole assembly, admire your work again, and maybe repeat that scotch thing, too. Then return it to the fridge for another 12 hours.

This is what it looks like after 12 hours.


after 12 hours

When the second twelve hours is over, pull it out again and separate the fillets. Scrape off all of the salt and dill and onion, and wipe the fillets down with paper towels. Now they are ready to eat. Take thin slices off, at a shallow angle, and put them on rye crackers, with cream cheese and slices of fresh red onion, or toast, or bagels, or whatever you like. In the Sunset Magazine fish cookbook, where I first learned how to do this, there is a recipe for a delicious mustard sauce that you can put with the fish as well.

Bon appetit! You have just taken a couple of small salmon fillets, and a few dollars of other ingredients and made it into a delicacy that sells in the fancy delis for $30/pound or more, and yours is going to taste a lot better!

People are often surprised when I tell them I can my own fish. The first time I canned fish, it was albacore, in California, and the instructions we had to follow made it needlessly messy and complicated. So here is a little photo essay of how I can salmon at home.

WARNING! Please be aware that there are hazards to this activity, and some of the risks are worth noting and making a strong warning about. Canners, operating under pressure, can explode if misused or if the valves and other safety features are not working properly! Also, on some types of canners, there is a pressure release valve that should be tested every year. Failure to do that could create unsafe pressure levels in the canner, or, fail to reach the adequate temperature to produce safe food. Don’t rely on just my instructions here! Read a book, or better yet, the instruction manual with your canner! If you insist on doing something boneheaded and blowing yourself up, or canning up a nice crop of botulinum, well, don’t come crying to me. I told you so!

Enough said…


fish flesh

I like to use wide mouth, half pint jars. Pints are too big, I think, and half pints make a bite-sized, less imposing gift for the faint of heart. Cut the fish so as to fit in whatever size jar you use, and carefully pack it into each jar, as fully as you can without going over the top of the jar. Throw a pinch of salt on the top of each jar’s contents.


packed into jars

Then carefully wipe each jar’s sealing edge clean, and put a NEW lid on, with a ring and screw it down snug.


jars ready to go

My canner is pretty much the cream of the crop: an All American, aluminum model 921. It has a weighted pressure control, rather than a petcock. I like the weighted kind better, but don’t lose your weight! It’s a drag to have a canner full of fish starting to warm up and then realize that you can’t find the weight. This canner also has no rubber gasket, which can fail. It has a carefully machined fit lid, and you need to dog the lid down evenly and snugly. Pack the jars in the canner. Use one of these metal layer separators on the bottom too. Put a couple of inches of water in the bottom before you close it up!

Once you get the canner packed and sealed up, put it on the heat, and watch for when it starts to vent steam. Once you get a good head of steam coming out of the vent for 10 minutes, then either close the petcock, or put the weight on, using the 10 PSI setting whichever you use. When the pressure comes up to 10, then start the clock. I use an hour and fifty minutes at 10 PSI.

When the time is up, turn off the heat and let it cool off. I usually deal with it in the morning, so it is good and cold when I have to handle it. I check and clean each jar as it comes out and then label it with a pen on the lid. Done!

If I figure an eight ounce tin of hand canned fish might go for 6 or 7$ at the co-op, then my 12# fish is “worth” about $100-120 if I had to buy it at the store.


in the canner

And I’m not done. I decided on this fish to take a couple of small fillets to make gravlax out of. I usually use coho for that, and have never made gravlax from a springer before. Should be good!


fillets for gravlax

Last but not least, I take the head and fins and all the other scraps and put it in the dutch oven with a little butter and cook it up on the stove. Salmon cheeks….. mmmmm…


fish head


dump truck

After living here for eight years, I am finally getting the hard rock road to my barn that I have been needing for all of that time. My barn is up on a small hill above the house and the driveway. During all but the driest months of summer, it has been impossible to drive a vehicle up there due to the soft ground and/or wet grass. All the time that we had sheep and had to deal with stocking up on hay, we had to get it in the barn during the driest parts of summer, or end up carrying one or two bales at a time up there by hand through the winter. I decked some logs up there one summer, and then by the time I was ready to mill them, it was the wet season again and I couldn’t drive the mill up there until the following summer. Now that I have no livestock, I could use the barn for other things except that I can’t get to it most of the year.

But all of that will be in the past by tomorrow afternoon. The guys from Longtain Construction in Cathlamet arrived at 8:30 this morning with two dump trucks, a bobcat and an excavator and by 5 PM they were almost finished with my new road. And all of the dirt that had to be excavated got used to create a new level spot for parking the boat trailers next to the shop.

Special thanks are due to a old friend who financed this extravagance. Thanks!


bobcat

What happens when all that snow melts and then it rains hard for a few days?

Flooding, that’s what. This is the state highway between my house and town, about an hour after high tide. Yes, I did drive through it, and yes, it was a little bit sketchy.

Maybe a plague of locusts will be next….


flood waters


flood waters