9/13-14/08 Ellen and I hiked to Spider Meadows and then spent the night in the log home. We arrived at the property on Saturday at about 7:00 PM. It was starting to get dark and I was very tired. I misjudged making the turn into the driveway and hit the gatepost with the side of the pickup. It tipped the post over and made a nice dent in the truck.

There was barely enough light for us to see the new concrete stairs and to carry our gear up the stairs. It was the first time Ellen had seen the cabin for quite a while so there was quite a bit new for her to see. We cooked and ate our dinner up in the cabin and slept up there in the bedroom. It was a little chilly in the morning so I started a fire in the wood stove which made it nice and cozy.

Bert and Ernie greeted Ellen from the front porch when she first opened the front door. We fed them some dog biscuits, took some pictures, and had a good time petting the dogs. When we left for home at about 10:00, we stopped in at Mike and Shirley's and arranged for Mike to take the dent out of the pickup next week. We had a nice chat with the two of them and we petted Bert, Ernie, and one of their cats during the conversations.

9/16-18/08 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived about noon and was greeted right away by Bert and Ernie. I gave them a couple dog biscuits and I unloaded the truck. Then I drove the truck over to Mike's so he could fix the dent. I walked back and had my lunch. I was just getting over a cold so I wasn't at my peak.

By the time I finished my lunch and was having my coffee, Mike brought the truck back all fixed up. He walked up the new steps and had a tour of the cabin. He hadn't been in it for many years so there was a lot new for him to see. I told him that I needed to have the double tree out the back door falled and that I wanted to hire out the insulation job for the ceiling. He gave me the name of a tree faller that he uses - Robert Ferrell - and he told me that Gayle's is about the only insulation contractor around.

Mike did a good job fixing the dent. He charged me $50 but I didn't have enough cash on me so I will pay him next week.

After Mike left, I decided to work on the water pipe. There aren't too many mosquitoes any more and I like to use the nice fall and spring days to work on the pipe. Since the electrical work is done and I can't do much on the roof yet, the water pipe is a good project for this week.

I started by going up into the woods and fixing the kink I had accidentally put in the pipe back on 4/19/07. I closed the valve down at the trailer so that water wouldn't run out of the hose while I worked on the pipe up above. Then I went up to the springbox, closed the supply valve up there and opened Dr. Dick's air valve. Then I went down to the kink and cut the pipe just above the kink. As soon as I cut through the pipe, water started spraying all over. I kept turning the cutter to cut all the way through and got pretty wet in the process. When the pipe was cut all the way through, I was happy to see such a strong stream of water gushing out. It gives me confidence that my choice of a 1 inch pipe was a good one.

With Dr. Dick's air valve open, it didn't take long for the top part of the pipe to drain completely. I cut the kinked section out of the pipe, and sweated the pipe back together with a coupler. Then I restarted the water and decided on a plan on how to proceed. There is about 75 feet of pipe lying on the ground between where the pipe leaves the creek bed and the hose connection. I am a little concerned about vandals finding this pipe, so I decided that I should bury that entire length. I did some bush clearing along the run and I dug about 10 feet of trench to about 12 inches deep using a post hole digger and a spade.

On Wednesday, I spent the whole day digging the trench for the water pipe. I got most of it dug to about 12 inches deep except for some pretty difficult stretches near some big trees. The ground is mostly rocks with big roots laced all around them. Pretty hard digging. I used an axe to cut the roots and I used the shovel and post hole digger to tease out the rocks and the dirt.

I thought that if I unhooked the copper pipe from the hose and drained the copper pipe it would make it easier to move it out of the way in order to dig the trench. That was a dumb idea. It did make the pipe a little easier to move, but it gave me quite a bit of trouble re-establishing the flow of water. Since the pipe runs uphill a ways as it comes up out of the creek bed, there is a lot of space for air bubbles to form. This stops the flow of water. I was able to get it going again by sucking the air out of the pipe with my mouth. It took a long time and gave me sore lips, but I did get it running again. I won't do that again. When the trench is ready, the pipe will continue downhill from the creek bed so those air bubbles can't get trapped like that.

My strategy is to dig the entire trench before I break the dam holding back the creek. Then with the dam removed, the creek will flow through the trench and I will be able to see that it always runs downhill. If there are low spots, they will collect pools of water and I will be able to see that I need to dig the trench deeper below them in order to drain the pools. When the bottom of the trench is always going downhill and the water is flowing down unimpeded, then I'll lay the pipe in the bottom of it, dam the top back up again, and then backfill the trench.

The end of that stretch of trench comes out at the rock outcropping that I had scouted out a way through earlier. By driving rebar into the ground, I had found a route that would allow an 18 inch trench through this one spot in the outcrop. I started digging the trench at this spot and then continued up the hill to meet the rest of the trench. I love to dig, so I had great fun pitting my skills against the rocks and roots that were trying to stymie me. The gray jay family found me in the woods and came around to coax me into taking breaks so I could feed them. It was a very pleasant day working in the woods.

On Thursday morning, I went back to work on the trench. I tackled a particularly tough stretch at the base of some big trees. Little by little, I cut through the roots and dug out the rocks and dirt. Bert and Ernie came to visit me in the woods but I didn't have any dog biscuits with me. The gray jays showed up again too.

Before I left for home, I checked under the hood of the truck to see if the packrats had been back in. I forgot to mention it in this journal, but a couple weeks ago, packrats had gotten into the engine compartment of the truck and hauled a huge amount of leaves in and packed them all around the firewall. They had also chewed on the plug wires and some hoses. Sure enough, when I opened the hood, I saw that they had been in there again. They had chewed up some insulation from somewhere under there and had built a nest between the carburetor and the distributor. They had done some more damage to the plug wires. I cleaned the mess out and was happy that the truck started up and ran. I'll have to have my mechanic check the damage when I get home. I left for home at 1:30.

9/19/08 (Friday) Went to CP Sheet Metals and talked to Curt Pritchard about getting new roof panels to repair the cabin roof. After thinking about the problem, I decided that piecing together the six salvaged panels, which were all bent to some degree, was a bad idea. It would be much better to work with only three new straight panels. The problem was how to get them up to the property. I called a truck rental place near CP and pretty much decided to rent a truck to haul the panels.

When I talked to Curt, he confirmed that it would be a bad idea to try to use the old panels. He gave me some tips on how to overlap the panels and he said that I could haul the 18 foot panels myself on my lumber rack. But I told him that my lumber rack had been stolen.

Then he told me that he had an old lumber rack that he had thrown on his garbage pile and that I could have it if I wanted it. I gratefully took it off his hands and loaded the parts into my truck. Curt's guys told me that the rack needed some work and that if I took it to a welder, they could probably fix it up.

On the way home, I took the truck to Maddy's where they replaced the plug wires and one hose and checked for other packrat damage.

When I got the truck back home, I inspected my prize. Some of the parts of the rack were bent. One stanchion was bent out of line and a couple of the flanges were bent out of shape. I was able to straighten the stanchion by propping it up between a couple of boards and driving the truck over it. I straightened the flanges out by beating on them with a hammer on the asphalt driveway. I didn't need to take it to a welder after all.