![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I love finding cool old stuff in the woods
Short recap of the last few days: I picked up Orion (le husband) from the airport on Wednesday night. I managed to get Thursday and Monday off from work (just had to work Friday), so it's been a nice vacation of sorts.
While I was at work on Friday, Orion built a bridge across the creek from scrap lumber in the yard. Now you no longer have to do a mile-long detour to get to the other side of the creek -- we have direct access to our land on the other side. Yesterday, we went over on the bridge and poked around in the woods, deciding to follow the bluff west for a ways and see where it went.
On the back side of our property -- this I found a couple of weeks ago -- there is a really old ditch several feet deep (part of the old water supply line for the gold mining operations in the area, we assume) and oodles of old telegraph line and down poles; well, we picked up the ditch/telegraph line again on the edge of the bluff, and ended up following it for about 4 hours, eventually (after much wading through brush and some nervousness about falling down abandoned mine shafts) came out on the highway a couple of miles from the house, south of the Steese/Elliot highway junction. We found a very old road, which generally paralleled the ditch and made better walking; along the road were a couple of old abandoned cabins, some big square wooden structures that Orion thinks are the tops of mine shafts, and all kinds of interesting trash. I picked up a metal dipper and an old metal army-type ammo box, because they were too interesting to leave lying in the moss. At what point does litter become cool historical stuff?
It's a nice time of year to be hiking in the woods. There's a couple inches of snow, just enough to cover the trees and make everything all winter-wonderland-looking, and the swamps are frozen up, but there's not so much snow that it's hard to walk through.
While I was at work on Friday, Orion built a bridge across the creek from scrap lumber in the yard. Now you no longer have to do a mile-long detour to get to the other side of the creek -- we have direct access to our land on the other side. Yesterday, we went over on the bridge and poked around in the woods, deciding to follow the bluff west for a ways and see where it went.
On the back side of our property -- this I found a couple of weeks ago -- there is a really old ditch several feet deep (part of the old water supply line for the gold mining operations in the area, we assume) and oodles of old telegraph line and down poles; well, we picked up the ditch/telegraph line again on the edge of the bluff, and ended up following it for about 4 hours, eventually (after much wading through brush and some nervousness about falling down abandoned mine shafts) came out on the highway a couple of miles from the house, south of the Steese/Elliot highway junction. We found a very old road, which generally paralleled the ditch and made better walking; along the road were a couple of old abandoned cabins, some big square wooden structures that Orion thinks are the tops of mine shafts, and all kinds of interesting trash. I picked up a metal dipper and an old metal army-type ammo box, because they were too interesting to leave lying in the moss. At what point does litter become cool historical stuff?
It's a nice time of year to be hiking in the woods. There's a couple inches of snow, just enough to cover the trees and make everything all winter-wonderland-looking, and the swamps are frozen up, but there's not so much snow that it's hard to walk through.