Fourth WTA Work Day--September 2013

After a day off, we all gathered for another fabulous hamburger dinner with coleslaw and chocolate toffee dessert treats. After we bedded down for the night, the sky exploded in a huge lightning show that circled our valley. The thunder from the lightning reverberated around our valley so I could never figure out what was the original lightning strike and what was the echo. I was hoping that the tree I was camped under was not the highest in the area. Counts from the lightning to the thunder was never more than 3 seconds. The lightning made my tent look transparent. This continued on for several hours as the thunder marched on east until it was just a dull rumble. If that was not enough, the rains began as a downpour. The volume of rain that fell was unbelievable.

 During the night, I saw that Ben had relocated to our tent kitchen. It turned out that his tent area had become a swimming pool with the torrential rains so he relocated for the rest of the night.

As we got up from this torrential downpour, it was still gently raining so we all got into our rain gear for the fourth workday. One of our first tasks was to place our stringers on the two turnpikes.

We were able to begin completing the 2nd turnpike with the culvert, but it was a lot of muddy grubby work we had to do to make room for the culvert and pack the turnpike with rocks followed by sandy dirt.

Liz and I are sawing through the lower stringer so the culvert can be installed. This is some tough, muddy, and grubby work that will never be seen when everything is done.

We now have installed the culvert which will move the water from one side of the PCT trail to the lower side without mushing up the trail.

Now that we have finished all of the culvert and rock work it is now on to hauling the sandy dirt from our forest sandpit to the turnpikes. Here we have Ben resting, Kathy is digging more sandy dirt and Terry is hauling away the dirt to our nearby turnpikes.

I am using a bag for hauling the sandy dirt. Check out how deep the hole is and how many trips we had to take to fill up the two turnpikes.

Today it seems like we will never be able to haul enough dirt to finish up these two turnpikes, but by the end of the day, it looks like we have finished up the first turnpike.