The story of this road is a really good one.
After we had been on the land for a few days back in early June, we took some walks up through the valley and observed the land around the valley to decided where to build the Heart Space Base.  After some perusal and observing, we came to a mutual agreement on a location on the hill to the north of the valley, facing south into the valley, but with views in most directions, albeit mostly with trees as a view, which are in themselves truly beautiful.  We started to clear the area where we plan to build the earthbag dome Heart Space Base.    It wasn’t that much later when we realized that the site we had chosen was literally just down the hill from an old logging road that had overgrown with ferns, brambles and several trees, but was still cut out of the hill and relatively level and wide.  It goes from the site to the main logging road that zig zags from the bottom to the near top of the land.  It is the perfect access to the site for getting the digger to the site to level it and for taking building supplies up there.  We won’t use it so much once the dome is built as we don’t want to abuse the land with trucks moving over it too much.

So, we started to clear the (what we have called) newold road.  Eagle got handy with the bow saw and felled a fair few of the saplings and other young trees that had sprouted up since the land was logged back in c1998.  I showed up the next day to shift them off the road as well as the old rotting branches and such that we lying across it.  Brambles had grown also, so those got cleared off as well.  Once many of the trees had been felled and moved away,  I got to raking the leaves off the entire road.  That took me a couple of days, but it was great to see that the surface was mostly clay and solid and firm.  Next, Reikiom and Eagle got busy with the chainsaw and felled the bigger trees, and then got the stumps removed.

 

 

It was altogether quite an operation, but all tribe members helped in the process.  Jaime and I did major work in taking down some of the bank above the road to ensure there is enough width. Eagle did a massive amount of clay moving to widen the entrance to the road from the logging road.  Jacob and Raquel helped us with all of that as well as helping move the branches from the felled trees, and doing a lot of de-barking the trees that will be used for the recipricol roof timbers of the dome.

 

The first few minutes of this video show what the road was like before we did anything with it:

This one shows it in the middle of our doing:

And this one is of it once we had it cleared!!

Good doing Heartsong Tribe!  🙂