Roads and Boulders

In spite of the gloomy overcast day, it's still beautiful up on the mountain. The grading crew is working hard to keep us on track. The drive from the paved road frontage is covered with a good coat of gravel.

They'll be bringing in mulch for the slopes later today. Mulch will dress up the entrance and help to hold loose soil from erosion.

While we waited on the next gravel truck, Maurice started working on the footer for the house pad. So far we've hit loose rock, some the size of a VW Beetle, but loose. The operative word is loose. Of course, when we start digging the footer in the NE corner of the house we hit a boulder the size of a bus.

The photo to the left shows just a bit of the boulder. The machine to the right in the photo is a jack hammer attached to a skid steer (Bobcat). They used to use dynamite, which I would have loved to fool around with, but now use the jack hammer. Dynamite could ruin our neighbors well, break glass for several hundred yards around, and throw large rocks high in the sky. I asked Maurice, after he told me that, "what was the downside to using dynamite?"

The jack hammer was not near as impressive as dynamite. As of this post, they broke through the boulder and were able to get the footer in place. The plan calls for concrete to be poured Thursday which means we start the foundation on Monday/Tuesday. Once the foundation is in, the cabin starts to take shape and actually look like a place someone might want to live in.

More coming,
z