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.