Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 9)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 9!
Taking A Day Off, Hiking, Hidden Treasures, Historical Deduction, Scouting Roads & The Internet Connectivity Challenge
I finally slept beyond two in the morning but not by much! I awoke at one twenty-four, peaked at the clock, grumbled to myself that it was too frigging early to get up and somehow managed to fall back asleep for nearly two more hours. I had slept a lot yesterday during the day and stayed up late into the evening in the hopes to get my sleep cycle adjusted but alas I guess that for whatever reason my body (or brain) wants me to be waking up at near two in the morning regardless of what time that I want to be waking up! Being awake a few hours earlier than when I want to be awake each day is not all that big of a deal and I have assuredly enjoyed having the extra time in the wee hours of the morning to get my daily writing done but whoa all the 'falling asleep before dark' each day has got to stop at some point so that I can really maximize the daylight hours for productivity purposes.
Anyway, I had decided the evening before to just take the day off and that proved to be more tricky than I thought that it would be. While doing my morning hike around the property with the small girl dogs (which has become a daily ritual over the last week to help socialize that male dog that lives here) I went by the new shelter site and looked at the place with 'fresh eyes' (meaning I disregarded all my previous plans for the place) and decided to shift where I was going to put the building to the far northern side so that it will not create a bunch of shade. With that in mind I got to thinking that the spot where I was previously thinking to put the building (on the south side) would make for a nice spot to have a fire-pit so that I could start turning some of my numerous brush piles into ashes and bio-char. The 'tricky' part (of taking the day off) was that I grabbed a garden rake and at first was just going to rake back some of the leaves to 'mark' the fire-pit area but instead I wound up spending a bunch of time raking the leaves back and scratching at the loamy soil so that it would all get saturated with rain before I start burning things over the next few days.
After all the raking I was like 'okay go do some hiking or something away from things that you can work on' which seemed like a good idea anyway just so that I could continue learning the lay of the land here and to see if I could locate a good long-term shelter site in the secluded portion of the forest. Since it is rattlesnake country and I did not have one of my walking sticks with me I got one of the oak sapling poles that I have in that big pile from the land clearing that I have been doing and began scraping a few spots on it smooth for easy gripping. About three knife strokes in I was like 'whoa here we go again working on something when I am supposed to be taking the damn day off' which lead me to doing the barest of minimums to make the walking stick usable before heading off into the bush with the dogs to see what we could see.
The hike itself was pretty relaxing and I basically hiked along the slope to the south of the new shelter site and then followed the property line down to the bottom of the slope where an old set of railroad tracks and a stream (now a dry-bed ditch) were in some bygone era. About a quarter of the way down the slope on the southern property line I found a nearly five meter long section of old railroad track rail which is pretty cool because if I can manage to fish it out of the undergrowth I can make myself an anvil with a portion of it and perhaps use the rest of it to build a guide/rail for a chainsaw sawmill which would be incredibly handy around here considering all the timber available and the amount of it that needs to be thinned out to help the forest be more healthy. With any luck I will find more of the rail material but hell I am happy just finding that one section. After finding that piece of rail it got me to thinking that it might not be a bad idea to sweep that portion of the property with a metal detector and see what other 'treasures' that I can turn up.
Further along in my hike I found some really large flat spots that might make for good homesteading sites but at the two nicest sites that I looked at there are massive one hundred year (or older) pine trees that are growing out of the slope above them and it is an absolute wonder that they have not fallen over due to there position uphill on a sandy bluff above each respective site. Those two sites are so beautiful as they are that I am hesitant to even consider disturbing them especially since they both have some beautiful big oak trees growing in them as well which of course contain a bunch of squirrel nests. They are lovely sites and all but they are at the foot of the slope and bordered by that dry stream bed which creates quite the sudden drop-off (nearly two meters vertically) below the sites. I dunno how to word it out but there was/is something 'majestic' about those two big flat sites and the idea of somehow spoiling that (by creating a homesteading area in one of them) just is not all that appealing. My attitude about all that may change over time but for now I think that I will continue scouting and see what other options that I can find because even if I did choose one of those spots I would have to delete a bunch of big trees in the process just to make it safe for a building and/or buildings.
One of the things that I wanted to accomplish with the hike was to have the dogs lay down their scent (by peeing and pooping) along the eastern property line where a few nights back I heard some hunting dogs come onto the property from the property that borders it there. There is more or less a small valley between the two properties and the bottom of the valley is where the dry stream-bed is which from the looks of it is a wildlife super highway with plenty of game trails and animal skat as clear indicators of the wildlife activity. In the long run it may actually be best to leave much of that area untouched just to ensure that the game have plenty of habitat but it also looks like at some point in the distant past someone created a bunch of long mounds bordered by small ditches and were perhaps growing either vegetables or fruit trees atop the mounds. It is hard to describe but the mounds/ditches are situated along the southern slope in such a way that them being used for growing on is the only thing that makes any sense as to why they were created in the first place.
Trying to deduce what the heck was going on with the land all those years ago is tricky at best but I sure do enjoy the 'mental exercise' of trying to deduce 'what is what' and why things are the way they are now. So far I think that when the land was originally clear cut for timber the first time (probably well over a hundred and twenty years ago) that afterwards the folks used that southern slope for mass production gardening and with the old railroad running close by they were probably loading it directly onto the train cars without ever having to transport the food off the property to ship/sell it. There was also that rather large stream so not only was water abundant but they could have easily used it to ship the goods either north or south on small skiffs or rafts.
I spent the rest of the day either hiking around other portions of the property or napping which made for a nice day off from doing a bunch of manual labor and gave my body a chance to heal a bit after the workload that I put it through over the previous days since re-locating here. For the most part I just hiked, napped, ate and hung out with the dogs all day and I sure do feel much better this morning for having done all of that. It was also nice just taking a step back from things and thinking more about the overall goals for the place, the shape the place is currently in and what kinds of things that I should really prioritize doing for the benefit of the land itself like removing invasive plants, doing some minor cleanup of litter along an adjacent road and looking at where good trails and access roads can be established or rehabilitated. I did find what I think might be an old roadbed that leads from that secluded portion of the woods (that I hiked to) and the front of the property which is more or less a long 'loop road' that skirts the base of the more elevated portion of the property. It would undoubtedly be a long route to reach the secluded area but in the end it might be the way to do it because it would pretty much just require felling some trees and scraping the topsoil off the old roadbed which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to turn a skidder path into a road or even worse creating a new road entirely. I am going to keep my options open and keep exploring for now but so far that is the best potential access road to that secluded area that I have found thus far.
All that jazz aside, I am going to make this post a bit shorter than my other recent ones because it is now a little after five-thirty in the morning, my roosters are crowing and it is going to take me the next hour or so before daybreak to get this all edited and posted. Writing in the morning like this is all about the timing and as much as I would like to write a small novel each day about the 'goings on' of my life I also have shit to do and cannot spend all my time tediously pecking out one word after another to do so! I should probably start making some videos and podcasts to cover my current adventures but given the dodgy nature of my current cellular data connection I think that I will wait until I at least get my cellular repeater setup and can get a better connection to handle the uploading. It seems like every time that I move to some new rural/remote area that I encounter this 'internet connectivity' challenge but each time I eventually overcome it so I feel confident that I will sort it all out eventually.
Well, I should just wrap this up and do all the stuff to get it shared so that I can get to working on stuff as soon as the sun peaks up over the pines and I can see what the hell I am doing outside. I hope that folks are doing well and that everyone has a nice day/night or something like that!
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
Nearly four years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition
Sounds like you're having a fun time exploring.
And a historical mystery to solve to boot. I wonder if there's anyone local who might be able to tell you what the land used to be used for, or is it just so remote that's not going to be the case?!?
It is pretty remote and not really many locals but who knows.