Road Trip Photos April 2017

The base of the dam.

Last blog post I said I would post some more photos from our latest road trip today.  We really worked hard while we were up at the cabin.  After four days of working on splitting and stacking wood, laying rock on the road, raking the yard, cleaning the cabin and painting we decided that we needed to take a day off.  We decided to take a road trip to see what we could see.  Since it was raining, I did not want to take an expensive camera with us.  These photos were snapped on my phone.  The quality of the photos is not great.

My husband and I have made the drive from our cabin to my mother's home for years.  Every time we made the trip we drove by a sign that said there was  the Lynchburg dam in one direction and a state fish hatchery in the other direction.  This time we decided that we would go take a look at the dam.  Why?  Because it was there and we had never seen it.  You never know in advance what you will see when you decide to take a different route.  There are so many things in the world that we pass by as we go about our business.  There is always something new around the next corner if we take the time to look.

Driftwood folk art.

Our trip took us about six miles through the National Forest.  For the most part, it looked just like our neck of the woods; in other words trees, rocks, streams and ridges.  The trees were mostly still bare here, so we had a good look at the woods without a lot of undergrowth.  The road was well maintained although there were a few bumpy spots.  However, I would say that the gravel road going to the dam is better maintained than the road leading to our cabin. 

On the way to the dam we came upon a one lane bridge.  There were a few fishermen on the bridge.  Some of them were fishing.  Others were just standing there talking.  They had to move close to the sides in order for us to get across the bridge.  They did not seem to happy about that.  In our section of the forest, if you pass someone or see someone camping, people wave to each other.  We waved to the people as we went by.  They just stared at us and did not wave back.  It is strange that there was such a difference in behavior in such a relatively short distance from our cabin.  Other than the fishermen, we only saw maybe three other cars in the forest.  It was a chilly, rainy, misty day and I think a lot of people decided that it was a good day to stay home. 

The edge of the burn area.

The road we took finally dead ended at the dam.  It is not a large dam compared to the dam I saw in Maryland, ( I have only seen two other dams, so I don't have a lot of reference for this.) but the reservoir that is behind the dam is huge.  Since few trees had leafed out yet, we were able to get a good look at the lake.  Once the leaves are out, some of those spectacular views will be obscured.  I am glad that we decided to go there while we could still see so much of the lake.   It is a very beautiful place. 

There were a few signs on the side of the building next to the dam.  One of them said the dam had received an award for being one of the best maintained dams in the country.  Another sign said to ring the bell on the other side of the building to call the caretaker.  I expected that it would be some type of mechanical buzzer.  When we went around the building, we found that it was a large brass bell.  We did not call the caretaker, but I expect that he or she might live in the house next to the building.  I am sure that you could hear that bell for quite a long way.  Speaking of signs, there were multiple signs saying that no dogs were allowed.  Also signs saying that there was no swimming or wading, but fishing was allowed with a permit.

There were four john boats in the water.  There was no information on rentals, so I do not know if they were for rent or for dam personnel to go out and check on things.  I guess I could check online if we wanted to see about boating there this summer.  I don't think it is a good idea to get very close to a dam but you could go quite a ways in the other direction.  

Then, there was a surprise.  I am a folk artist.  I love folk art: art made by people for their own pleasure.  And here, at this dam, sitting on a table was a beautiful piece of folk art.  Someone had made a small tableau of a boathouse and some boats tied up to pilings.  It was made of wood and metal on a base of driftwood.  Most likely the driftwood was from this very lake.  I snapped a picture for the blog. It was an unexpected pleasure.

We  could have walked out along the walkway across the top of the dam.  However, the rain was picking up so we decided that we would head on to our next destination rather than get soaking wet and cold.  So we came, we snapped pictures, and we left.  Now that we know what is there, we may come back again some day.

Our next destination was to the Mount Pleasant hiking area.  We were not planning on hiking in the rain.  We went because there was a forest fire there last year.  It was a big fire covering thousands of acres.  At Mount Pleasant firefighters made a final stand to put out the fire before it started burning homes.  This area is about two and a half miles from our cabin by road, but only about a mile as the crow flies.  There was a tremendous effort by firefighters to save the homes in this area.  The road through the Mount Pleasant area was the fire break.  They made a thirteen hundred yard fire break line to turn back the fire.  The area is all plowed up where they bulldozed in roads so they could get into the burn area.

We only went in a short ways into the fire area.  This was where the fire was finally put out.  Here, mostly the undergrowth was burned, but you could see where the trees were singed.  I expect that many of the trees at the edge of the fire will survive, but a lot of them are going to fall down.  It was almost surreal to see that on one side of the road trees are black and burned while everything on the other side of the road looks completely normal. 

I was almost in tears when I saw how close the fire came to one home.  It was stopped only yards away.  I know that everyone with cabins near ours was watching the fire line on the internet, feeling completely helpless while watching the fire come closer and closer.  A mile away in not very far when you are talking about wildfire.  It is very painful when you think that something you love so much can be gone in a matter of minutes.

We did not go very far into the area, so we did not see the worst of the burned areas.  The road is very torn up there.  The ride was just bone jarring.  Also, we had read that trees in the area would be falling for quite some time.  We turned around as soon as we could find a place wide enough.  Even, the edge of the burned area was a dismal sight.

Anyway, that was our side trip.  I have a few more pictures, that I will share in my next blog post.  Check back on Sunday.

Cabin Trip - First One for 2017

Trees were beginning to leaf out on the way up.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks.  Several days of that we were staying at the cabin.  This is our first trip up this year.  I have a lot of photos from the trip.  It may take a couple of blog posts to get the best photos on the blog.  I took a lot of them. 

Trees bare at higher elevations.

When we left, it was mid-April and the trees were just beginning to leaf out.  Down here in Mechanicsville, the leaves were coming out.  The Dogwoods had bloomed and were loosing there blossoms.  As we drove further inland, and higher in elevation, the trees were just beginning to put out leaves, and everything was a beautiful spring green.   At the elevation of the cabin, few trees had put out leaves yet.  The apple trees had blossomed though.  I think we will be having a year with a bumper crop of apples.  All the apple trees were so covered with blossoms that the trees were sagging. 

Apple tree in blossom.

At the cabin, you could watch Spring come in by the day.  The Dogwoods put out leaves and blossoms.  The Maple leaves were coming in with their early red-orange leaves.  Next the Birch started to leaf out.  The ground cover under the trees came in so quickly that you could almost see it grow.  On arrival, the undergrowth was completely under the leaf cover.  Things went from a few flowers here and there to small flowers and green leaves everywhere in just a day or two. Spring comes in quickly at the higher elevations.  The growing season is short and the plants want to make use of every second of it.

Trees had leafed out by the time we left.  An old barn.

We still need to split a lot of wood.

Opening up the cabin for the year is a lot of work.  Although everything was tidy and clean when we left, we came back to all the dead bugs that had somehow managed to find a way into the house.  They all had to be cleaned up.  That is a normal part of cabin maintenance.  The annoying part was the bugs that were not dead.  All the cabins up there have a problem with lady bugs.  Although many people think of them as "cute", I will never think of them that way again.  Lady bugs live through the winter.  There were lady bugs everywhere.  They could crawl into impossibly small cracks to get away from you.  I went around the cabin three and four times a day for three days sucking up lady bugs with the vacuum cleaner.  I would take the canister outside and dump it after each foray around the cabin.  The lady bugs even survive the vacuum cleaner.  By the fourth day, I had the cabin pretty much clear of lady bugs.  (Fact: lady bugs are not a native species.  They were introduced into this country in 1916 from Asia for pest control  They eat aphids.)

The first trip up each year is also a time when there is a lot of yard cleanup.  We have big Maple trees and the high winds from the winter storms mean that the yard has branches and sticks all over it.  The winds mostly scour the leaves off the yard, but it still needs a good raking.  Leaves gather in little depressions throughout the yard.  When you look at the yard, it does not seem to be in too bad a condition, but once you start raking you end up with a couple of tarps full of leaves.  Until the rain started half way through our stay, the ground was very dry.  I was raking up a lot of dust.  Up there, the rainfall is about three inches below average for the year.

Maintaining the road is a work in progress.

This year, the cleanup was much more than usual.  Last fall, we found that one of the large Birch trees was completely dead at the top.  This tree was just feet from our shed and only a short distance from our back porch.  We had to call in a tree company to take it down.  They came up to the cabin this winter.  We had them drop the tree and cut it into fourteen inch lengths so that the wood would fit into the wood cook stove. (The cook stove has a much narrower opening that a heating stove; only four inches wide and fourteen inches long.)  Their company did not split wood.  They did not really want to do the cleanup either, so we ended up just having them drop the tree and we took care of the rest of it ourselves.  (Someday I will make a blog post just on the problems of trying to get workmen to come out to a place that is in the middle of nowhere.  There are a number of stories on this.)

Anyway, the tree was huge.  I measured one of the pieces of log and it was twenty inches in diameter.  That was not even the largest piece.  My husband split them using wedges and some heavy wood mauls.  They were so heavy that he had to at least be split in half before we could move them. He split wood, I helped get the wood up onto the chopping block, so he could split it.  Then we stacked the split wood.  There was no way to split it all this trip, some of it is stacked, waiting for splitting on some other trip.  At the rate we burn wood up there, I think this wood will last us a couple of years.

Aside from stacking wood, we also had to clean up all the debris.  The tree contract was just to drop the tree and haul the branches back into the woods.  They did do some of the larger branches, but there was a lot of the (relatively) smaller sticks left around.  We hauled all that stuff up from the lower level, up the hill, and over the side at the back end of the property.  I would have liked to have burned it, but there were high winds gusting twenty to thirty miles per hour every day.  It was not a time to have any type of fire going outdoors.  

We also did some other work while we were up there.  My husband painted the eves of the house and the trim on the windows.  The harsh weather up there really takes its toll on paint and wood.  It feels as if something always needs painting or repairing.

 While he was painting, I worked on the road.  The road is a story on its own.  A dirt road needs to be maintained, or it turns into deep ruts.  This is especially true of a road on the side of a mountain.  Tires can dig deep ruts if the road is wet, especially on the steep slope at the bottom that is covered with grass.  Rain water running down the road turns those ruts into gullies.  Pretty soon you have deep ruts that make for a bone jarring ride up the road. 

My mother used to maintain the road.  Now I do it.  I started digging gravel from the stream, bringing it up by the bucketful from the stream bed, up to the first level of land, then up the rock steps to the cabin yard where I dumped the bucket into a wheel barrow.  When the barrow was full, I trundled it uphill to the road, then down the road to where I needed to put gravel.  However, the gravel was small and it eventually sunk right into the mud.  I needed larger rock.  I eventually decided that all the work of digging gravel was a waste of time and energy and started buying bags of rocks.  (By that time, I estimate I had dug at least twelve hundred pounds of rock from the stream.) 

Without looking back in the cabin log to find the exact time that I started putting rock on the road, I can say with certainty that I have been buying rock for more than five years.  I did not bring bags of rocks every trip, but a conservative estimate would be at least six bags of rocks on a minimum of three trips each year; some years it was more than that.  Rock is sold by the cubic yard, but I find it more meaningful to think of it in pounds.  Each of those bags weighs about fifty pounds.  I am estimating at least 4500 pounds of rock on the road plus the rock I hauled from the stream.  I have finally reached a point where I can a the difference in the road.  The first few years I was just filling in the latest ruts.  I have put enough rock on the road that it is starting to become a hard surface in some places.

My husband always wondered why in the world I just did not order a truckload of rock.  Two reasons, one of which is the problem of getting anyone to come out that far.  The other is that I did not want a giant pile of rock sitting on the edge of the property waiting for me to haul it down the road.  A truckload of rock is a lot of rock.  Furthermore, paying someone to fix a road is pretty expensive.  If I had someone do the work it would be one more strain on the cabin budget.  I am content to fill in the road a few hundred pounds at a time.

Well, this post is getting long.  I will be blogging more on our cabin trip and a side trip on the next blog post.  Check back on Thursday for more photos from the road.

Star and Leaf Quilt Part 6

I haven't been posting as often this year.  I am working on things, but progress is very slow.  I am in the throws of spring cleaning so my work time on projects is greatly diminished for the moment.  Sooner or later things will pick up again.  Hand quilting a large quilt  does not go quickly either, so for every few hours of work time I have only a little bit of progress to show for it.

Last blog post I showed that I had created some stencils to use for quilting.  I have started implementing those in the quilting now.  It is all an experiment.  I quilted the main leaf and probably should have left it at that if I wanted the quilt finished any time soon.  I decided that there was just too much negative space and decided to fill it in with a few small quilted maple leaves and spirals.  The spirals helped fill the space, but also represent the helicopter-like seeds that spiral down when the trees drop their seeds each year. Although it is harder to see it in the photo, the orange really stands out against the brown fabric when viewing it in person.

I had originally quilted in some connecting lines between the maple leaves.  However, it made the block look over-quilted compared to the star block.  I removed those lines.  The block looks better.  However, while removing them I also ripped out one of the stitches of the maple leaf, so one of those will have to be done over.  It won't take that long.  I will be finishing that up tonight.  Things are moving along with the quilt.  I am about a third of the way finished with the blocks.  I hope to have it finished before too long. 

I am also working on a couple of other projects which I will be blogging about shortly.  I am one step closer to getting started on the Flamenco Dancer doll.  I have most of the materials gathered for the  armature.  I will be experimenting with some new techniques for this doll.  It will be the largest doll I have ever made.  More on that in coming blog posts.  I am also working on another project that is more or less a papier mache' project.  It is a fun project, but it takes up much more time than you would ever think.  More on that in a few blog posts.