Welcome!
2017 started out with my husband and I purchasing 60 acres of the most beautiful property! Many of you know that my husband made one of my life dreams come true when we built my studio two years ago. My Husband's dream has been to own land, land to walk, land to hunt and land to share with his children and grandchildren. That dream was fulfilled on March 22, 2017 so I thought I would take you for a walk.
We have our very own creek! There is also a beautiful waterfall which I will share with you in another post, but here's the creek! It needs cleaning up so that the water can flow easier but we will be leaving that for a hot day in the summer when will be able to clean up and cool off at the same time and we are hoping to get the grandkids involved.
You don't have to walk very far before you see fallen trees but that's part of mother nature. I never realized how big 60 acres is and I still don't think I have a complete understanding.
Thorny rosebushes are a constant on the land. I will tell you they HURT when they grab a hold of you, somehow they make it all the way through your clothing to your skin. Definitely a place you want to be wearing long sleeves and long pants when walking through. We hope to be able to get the trails/paths opened up before summer so that we can talk walks through here without donating a pint of blood along the way.
More downed trees. We had a pretty severe wind storm a few weeks back and this peace of heaven on earth lost around 7 - 10 trees that we've seen so far. I know that's a big gap but it's still difficult in some spots to tell if it's a new fall or an old one.
Rock walls! We've got plenty of those too! Most of them were put there to create a property line and the rest of them were just put there to move the rocks out of the way. Again you can see there aren't only rocks there but sticks and other items that will need cleaning up.
One of the many paths through the land. Some of them are walkable right now, others aren't. The land was logged over 5 years ago and after it was logged it was sold. The person that purchased it did their best to start cleaning it up but was only able to get so much done. When the loggers came through they had no respect for the land at all. If their machines didn't fit through an area they wanted to go they made it fit. I'm not kidding! As you walk down a path you can see where the equipment ripped at the bark off the trees that were in the way. I understand that logging of land is important and I don't have any issues with that at all but what I do have issues with is the damage they left behind with their equipment. The damage to trees is nothing when you compare it to the ruts that they left in the earth. I'll post pictures of the ruts and how it caused the natural flow of the creek to be disrupted.
Above you can see my husband looking for trails from the map we received of the property. The prior owner did a fantastic job of making a map of all the different trails on the land. It has helped us a great deal in navigating our way around. So far we think we've walked almost all of the trails. We've spent two evenings walking, both nights we walked for over 2 hours, just looking at the land and trying to get our bearings of where the trails are and an over view of what our first priorities need to be.
One of our downed trees :(.
This was on our walk out of the woods, I found this proof of mother nature. Part of me finds it sad because of the damage to the tree but the bigger part of me realizes it's all part of our life cycle.
I hope I can find this tree again so I can share it with Austin, Natalie & Lyon. I'll have to pull out the book on birds so we can see if the holes will give us an indication of what type of woodpecker is living in our woods. It will be a fantastic adventure and learning experience for all of us!
Thank you for allowing me to share a little bit of our life with you!!
Margaret
