Horses on pasture at camp in the early morning
Here’s where we’ve been. Camping on the Divide in the Weminuche Wilderness, just the three of us, Alan the Shepherd, and 7 of our horses…
The horse hauling a load of big rocks to the hole in the ditch
A lot of man (and woman) power
Here’s what we’ve been doing. Moving about 6 tons dirt, and almost as much rock… all by hand and horse power.
How? A lot of work. Fueled by a lot of food. Yes, we use shovels; no, we don’t use any power tools or equipment: this is the Wilderness with a capital “W.”
We’re the official Ditch Maintenance Crew for a trans continental water diversion which brings water from a river flowing to the west side of the Divide over to east side, along a mile long ditch originally build back in the 1930’s.
For the past two years, the job entailed raising the banks in low spots and cleaning out the deposit in the bottom; maybe a few trees being felled by the two-man cross-cut saw. The shovels and picks and saws are our only tools, except for the magnificent draft cross horse that moves more in one go-round, with absolute ease, than would take us a half hour of back breaking work…
But this year, with fallen trees from the hillside covered with dead spruce from beetle kill, the ditch was blocked and a side of the bank blew out in a most inconvenient location. So in a pinch, to get the water flow resumed as soon as possible, we rebuilt the ditch bank.
Forrest in the blown out section of ditch bank
The ditch running water after our work
Fancy job? Remember from “Caddy Shack” that the world needs ditch diggers… but jokes aside, we love our work. Talk about a good, hard, honest days work! We earn our sleep at night…
In fact, the boys are still asleep… and I’m not quite caught up with sleep yet. But I wanted to share this with you now. More details, and more about the incredible beauty we are so lucky to live and work in up there will follow over the weekend…
On the ride home yesterday evening
Posted by: highmountainmuse
Categories: