So I got pulled for the DNR White Mountains II Staking lottery and just couldn’t pass up staking 20 acres. So Tyler and I head out Thursday night, drove up to 53.4 mile Steese and then rode the ATV’s into Jake’s cabin.
We had a pleasant night and got some sleep, not a lot of sleep as Jake has a VCR and TV in the cabin running off of his generator and Tyler had to watch a movie until 2:00 AM Friday, needless to say he was a bit tired when I woke him at 6:30 AM for breakfast.
I decided to start at the bottom of the area I wanted to stake since it was the hardest section to clear for access along the staking lines and I’m glad I did. We hung out by the location for the first post, hung out I say because we had to wait until 8:00 AM before we could place our first post and flags or take the chance of having our staking permit pulled. But at 8 o-clock on the dot we got to work brushing out the area for that first post.
My plan this trip was to use rebar and 4×4 post which worked out good. I pre-cut and drilled holes in the bottom of the 4×4’s for the rebar, drove it (the rebar) into the 4×4’s about 8 inches and then drove the whole thing into the ground for our corners. We had to place 8 corners, yeah, this was fun, I wanted to stake this one spot I knew of but part of it ran along the property line of folks who had staked land back in the early 80’s. This particular area had a weird U shaped cup on one side of about an acre in size. DNR didn’t want me isolating that acre so I had to include it in my 20, which meant 4 more post to get it included. I did get lucky and find the 4 corners to the previous staking offering and it went much faster than I expected.
As you can see in some of the photos below, a good portion of the area is inside the 2005 forest fire burn, but it did have a good start on some thick grass and lots of moose sign, and then we found this natural spring, humm, lots of tracks in that mud, maybe a new place to hunt in September or after the general moose closes and I have to fill my draw tag :<)
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Jake showed up around noon on Friday and it’s a good thing he did too. My chainsaw had mechanical issues, alright, so I goofed and screwed up one of the bar bolts and couldn't change my chain and was not looking forward to having to keep sharpening my chainsaw chain all day. Dang rocky dirt gets hard on them chainsaw chains, has a nasty habit of dulling the edge. If you want to get a good feel for what it was like, take your chainsaw, slice out a piece of asphalt from your driveway and then try to cut a couple logs. I got to the point where I was drawing the chainsaw back and forth like hand saw, well it felt like it helped doing that.
Worked on the corners and lines until around 4:30 Friday and called it a day, figured we’d just get an early Saturday, Not….
Woke up Saturday morning to a deluge of rain, I mean it was raining so hard I could of taken a shower in it, too bad the hot water wasn’t working
We’ll the rain did lighten up around 10:00 AM so off we went and finished up placing the corners and brushing the lines. I had to make another trip to get my GPS coordinates down, figure the azimuth from corner to corner and touch up my notes. By dinner time I was all done and tired. It was pretty good two days actually, now to finish up the paper work and we can go home.
Saturday night I realized I had forgotten to get the actual footage between post, well darn it, so Sunday morning Jake heads home at 8:00 and Tyler and I go back for another trip around the perimeter so I can mark the actual foot from post to post, an easy task actually.
By 11:00 AM were done and heading home. It was nice to get this one done and this is the last land acquisition I plan on doing for a while. Now I have to finish up building a cabin and decide what to build at Mt. Ryan and when we’ll build something here.
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