Mountain Lane Homesteaders

It's time again I think, for another update on our do it yourself adventure. If you're a new visitor to my blog you can read more about how we got to this point by clicking on "Journey to the Dream" under my categories.

We were getting ready to "sell" the bank on the idea of making us a loan to purchase the land, add utilities, and build our house. Basically we only requested a small amount for the house part because we are doing all the building ourselves and we are planning to use as many natural resources as we can harvest...trees and rock.

One of the things we based a great deal of savings on was the wood we would need for rafters for both the "shed" we were building to live in temporarily and the actual house. For this purpose we were able to get a special pole permit from the Forest Service that allowed us to harvest up to 100 dead standing trees. The phrase "7 inches at the butt" became a normal part of our vocabulary during this part of the process! That was the requirement. We could take any dead standing tree as long as it was no bigger than 7" across at the base or "butt" of the tree.

Once again we had a plan. Sam's brother Stan was coming to stay with us for a week to help us get these trees out and to be a part of our fun. We had searched out an area ahead of time where there was a large stand of dead trees and Sam was using a week of vacation time from the bank so we were all set to go. We packed up a cooler of lunches and snacks and 2 big jugs of icewater as well as some pop and lemonade. The kids had their bags of activities to stay busy with during times they could not be of help. It took us probably an hour to get out of town and up where we had decided to cut.

That first day out was another learning curve day. We had to find some way to make sure our trees were the right size so Stan (A high school math teacher) did a calculation to figure out the circumference the tree would be if it's diameter was 7". We came up with some number around 21", cut a length of yellow hunter's ribbon to size and proceeded to wrap this around tree trunks to try and find the sizes we could take. After a while we figured out that the best thing to do was to cut the trees down regardless of size, cut the parts that were too thick to take out as poles into 6 foot lengths since we needed those too, and then use the remainder of the tree as the pole. That yellow ribbon was in constant use. We also had to hand carry every 6 foot section and long pole out of the woods by hand and get them loaded on the back of our truck.

Each pole measured between 20 and 34 feet long.

Great picture of me. And in case you are wondering...... yes, it's heavy. My shoulders are not made for this! I eventually switched to carring the log horizontally in my arms like a baby and it worked much better.

I think that first day we actually retrieved 7 trees. Lots of back breaking work and only a very little dent was made in the 100 trees we needed. It wasn't much but we were determined that the next day we would do better.

We drove slowly down the mountain so that the poles would not come sliding off the back of the truck or hit the road as we bounced along.

Now that I look at the pictures I can't believe we didn't have the trees secured somehow. Thankfully we were able to make it down without losing any and took them over to Frank's ("Our Friend Frank the Logger") wood yard where we would be storing them until we were ready to make them into rafters. Frank took one look at what we had "accomplished" and promptly offered the use of his kubota tractor, his truck, and his flatbed trailer for the next few days as well as a cable for pulling the trees out onto the road once cut so we could get more done. We unloaded our few poles and 6 foot logs and went back home to collapse and rest up for Day 2.

Check back next time for our improvements!