When I purchased my hunting property in early 2017 the only marker off the forest road was a dangling piece of orange tape hanging from a tree. I had grand plans to clear a route back to a site I had designated for a cabin build. I quickly removed the brush to the entrance from the forest road, marked the trees to be cleared and built a temporary trail.
Fast forward a year and a half to February 2019, and I’m finally getting around to clearing the road. Although I do frequent the property to camp and hunt the house remodel among other things, have slowed me down on the property improvements. My good friends Paul and Spencer drove up from Texas with a couple of extra chain saws, and we finally proceeded with clearing the road.
We made a lot of progress on the first day of work with Pual moving ahead felling the trees, Spencer cutting the stumps to the ground, and myself logging the felled trees. It was a very efficient process, and the road is beginning to take shape.
Two weeks later I return to continue the cleanup. I worked the entire weekend logging felled trees, stacking logs, and using loppers to clean all the smaller branches up. The roadway is beginning to materialize.
During the prior work where we felled the trees, we also knocked down two good size pines to open up the shooting lane to a full 180 degrees from the tree stand. I cleaned these up and cleared a large area of the brush as I plan to increase the food plot size this year.
The deer did not seem to mind the landscape changes at all.
In a few more weeks Paul, Spencer, and Norm are heading up to continue the work. At that point in time, I’ll have an ATV and trailer to begin moving the cut logs to the cabin site to start a firewood stack, and Spencer might bring his tractor which will speed this up. Since we will have multiple vehicles on site, I also cleared out the brush at the entrance to allow more parking.
A few weeks later and the crew came back out. Spencer brought his tractor and I had 24 tons of road base rock delivered. While we were waiting on the rock Spencer moved a pile of large boulders and evened out the angle of incline with the tractor and then proceeded to spread and grate the gravel.
After a long hard day of work, it was time to set up camp and relax by the fire.
Spring is coming. View from a 1/4 mile up the road near one of the gas distribution wellheads looking west down on my wooded acreage.
After a couple of weeks of the felled tree and rock clean up the entrance section of the road is complete.
