E-Z

I always am wary when someone says something is going to be easy. I question whether it really is easy or E-Z, a term that reminds me of the difference between Christmas and xmas (kind of like the real thing but not really).

The two acre patch that we cleared last year is one of the spots that we scheduled for planting. It is some of the steepest terrain on the place with more than an 80 degree slope. With the need to pack the seedlings into our forest, we had the choice of backpacking the heavy packs with shovels, ho-dads, and lots of fluids up the steep hillside several hundred feet or to drive in from the Weyerhauser mainline and drive smaller skid roads about 10 miles to come in from the top of the hill and pack down to our property. The pack up hill from our fields at the bottom would take a minimum of three people with three trips, from the top and packing down we could shuffle the three loads from the pickup and into our forest and from the neighbor property divide to our sections that needed to be planted. We decided on the E-Z pack down hill  from the neighbor property.

When the neighbors did their clearcut last year, we were told that they had rocked their road to the landing behind our property and that they made a ‘path’ to our place for E-Z access. A note about E-Z access, big equipment that can traverse large stumps, full sized chunks, hunks of half-rotted logs and piles of slash, can make it over a so-called path where a human struggles a bit. Add heavy backpacks, shovels, cages, bamboo stakes and enough liquid to keep hydrated throughout the day, the path is not quite as E-Z as it sounds.

Mike drove Marilyn and I to the path and helped pack through the not-so-easy-path, he even helped plant for a while before getting back to the pickup to drive to the house, grab the Gator and the dogs and head for the back of the big field where he had to walk back up to where we were planted to help finish off the first day.

It is easy to forget how steep the hillside is, and how out of shape a body can get since summer time. The slope and leavings from the logging project provided lots of areas where I had to crab crawl around just to keep for slipping backwards while trying to plant. Aches and pains followed us all down the hill that day and we woke up with some surprising new ones in the  morning, but the planting continued for a second day. Thank goodness the rest of the areas are not as steep and had been raked clear by the help of the bulldozer after logging. It should be an E-Z finish to the replanting task.

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