Opening up the Hollow
Dad and I drove down to the Hollow today to make sure that everything would be ready for next week’s stay. We arrived to find two pickups from the power company parked in the drive ahead of us–we don’t get a lot of visitors, although we’re never sure what happens when we aren’t there.
They were there to spray the plants underneath our power lines, and their trucks were full of all kinds of maintenance equipment. Its always useful to have a friend with a chain saw. It turned out that there had been a big storm a couple of days ago, and a maple tree had come down on the drive. They offered to clear it out for us, and 5 minutes later, the road was open again.
We were planning on weedeating and bushhogging, but the drive was rutted from the heavy rains this week, so we decided to pull the bushog off the back of the Kubota and mount the blade. To make a long story short, it turned out that the tractor wasn’t broken, it only had a loose battery cable. This was successfully diagnosed remotely by the farmer across the valley, who still came over to supervise our wrenchwork.
There’s a reason that road graders have such long chassis with the blade mounted in the center, instead of at the end of a long lever hanging off the back. When you use a blade on a tractor, every little bump in the road surface causes a wild fluctuation in the height of the blade. It goes better with one person standing on blade, sometimes leaning towards the high side, yelling height instructions to the tractor driver. Inside of 15 minutes, we’d made a pretty good work out of the road, neatly filling in the ruts.
We put the bushhog back on tractor, and Dad mowed the meadow while I went over the drive with a rake. Dad bought a new Stihl weedeater, and I gotta tell ya, a new Stihl chops up a lot more weeds, a lot faster, than its 25 year old predecessor. I did the face of the dam, and some of the surrounding areas.
The pond was more full than I’ve ever seen it. A couple years ago, when the standpipe rusted out, we enlarged the pond by setting the outlet of the new pipe a couple feet higher. Also, we had 30 years worth of silt pulled out of the back of the pond, and also had it dug out a bit wider and longer in the back. After the big storm, the crick was still running into the back of the pond. The water is usually a couple feet below the outlet by July, so its pretty unusual to see it full up at this time of year.
The guys from the power company said that someone had sighted a funnel cloud nearby during the recent storm. There musta been some funky winds, because there were an unusual number of trees down–mostly at the top half. Besides the one on the drive, there were three down on the drive to the meadow. Two big branches came down with a thump, a few hundred yards from me while I was working. I haven’t seen this many trees and branches down since the big ice storm a few years ago.
Sighting: great blue heron