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 :<) [flagallery gid=57 name="Gallery" skin=StylishGrey] 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 . So we hung out and had a leisurely morning, ate breakfast, and watched it rain. Tyler asked me if we “had” to go out there and I said yes, one way or another we’ll be finishing up the field work, just hope the rain lightens up first.

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.

So we went down to Hurricane again this weekend for three days of rain, sweat and mud. Plan was to finish up cutting our new trail in to the cabin site, haul the twenty 8 foot 6”x8” railroad ties to be used for the posts and start digging holes for them.

Tyler and I headed in Friday afternoon after lunch and the day was just beautiful, the sun was out and Denali was highlighted by the clouds behind it. So off we go and it’s not bad, trail is still muddy but useable, Tyler and I tried to find two of the long/lat points that indicated where the new trail should be and I think we found them, but I will have to do a recheck next trip down. Then we went back to cutting brush and moving along until about 6:30 and decided it was time for dinner.

Saturday morning Dean shows up and brings the rain with him, an unfortunate end to our sunny weekend. After breakfast we all headed in to cut brush, I was thinking this should be a cakewalk at this point, man was I wrong. The new trail is following the platted route of a road that was never built. It was platted by the state back in 1980, just never constructed and seeing how it’s on higher ground, it should also be drier, or so goes the theory we had.

Ha, the first half is OK and were doing good following the line, then we start to run into wet ground, bummer. So at around noon we decide we needed more info (more long/lat points to go by) but this means back to town and that means we won’t do any more trail work until the next time we come down. I guess I’ll be making some trips to DNR to get the long/lat info we need.

So we finish off the day hauling the rest of the post in and what I was planning to use for footers. On the way back to camp we found some nice fresh Black Bear tracks in the trail, fresh as it rained the night before and these tracks are still well defined, but no bear.

So after hauling the rest of the ties into the site we start digging out the footer holes and get down 2 feet and oh s%#t, water is just a gushing in there, not good. OK, time to rethink (again) and go to plan B. Plan B requires a 2 man auger with 10” drill stem, you ever lift one of those thing, let’s just say their 2 man augers cause one guy can hardly lift it up let alone use it with the auger going. But of course we don’t have an auger with us, so another item on the list for next trip.

So we’ve done all we could with what we had, trail building on hold until we get more data, post placement on hold until we get auger, nothing left to haul in this trip and we still have Sunday to do something, heck, guess we’ll go exploring. So it’s dinner and good night’s sleep, wake up Sunday morning and were socked in, it’s raining to beat all you know what and you can’t see the mountains the clouds are so thick and low. So it’s time to pack up to head home.

It was a disappointment that we had to leave, Tyler was of course bummed because we didn’t get to go back and set up some targets for him to shoot at with his new 22, I promised him we would next trip out. So a nice easy drive home with all the tourist rubber necking along the highway.

We get about a half mile south of the entrance into Denali Nat’l Park and the hwy is blocked by a small car and 30 foot RV in front of me. I look to the right and yeah, OK, a brown spot walking down the road, probable just a moose, wait, that ain’t no moose, to short and moose don’t have that strut, dang it’s a Griz and he’s just wandering along the highway like he owns it. Of course no one is getting out of their vehicle to dispute that attitude with him I can assure you.

We’ll we pull over and this, in Tylers words, “Small Griz”, walks right pass us by 15 feet or so. I have to admit I keep thinking “please don’t smell anything you want to eat”, last thing I needed was to have some young Griz decide he liked the smell of those groceries in the RV and enter the motorhome to help himself to some, of course that would have made one heck of story……, sorry for the mess honey, you see this little O’l Grizzly decided he wanted your potato salad and………

Last week commenced the brushing of the cabin location and trail into it. It was a muddy and wet start.

Tyler and I went down Thursday night and got a fresh start Friday morning riding what last year was a nice dry trail. The rain this year has so far been fair and almost non-existent if you consider the fires we’ve been having, but not on our first ride in. Muddy and slick was the theme for the weekend, but we did make some good progress Friday and located the actual markers for the northeast and northwest corners. Finding the northwest corner was a fluke more than anything. The dang willows are 12 to 14 high and thicker than blades of grass on a golf course. I just happened to see this flash of sunlight reflection and low and behold there it is, the same darn marker I’d spent the last 4 hours trying to locate. But we did find it, so all is good.

Dean showed up Saturday morning at 1:00 AM, this is of course getting to be his habit coming to camp at midnight that is. We did the hellos and went back to sleep only to get up 6 hours later to have breakfast and gear up for the day. Gearing up mainly consisted of chain-saws, oil and gas and rain gear. Yup, a wet raining days to cut brush. We did a pretty good lick in on the trail and the building pad as you’ll see in the picture below. I just wished we had a week of dry sunny days to finish it up with.

Next weekend were hauling in the post timbers (railroad ties actually) and might even have some time to work on a couple of the post holes. But if we can get the trail finished up and all the poles hauled in, then life will be easier. Maybe we’ll see some more Moose like that cow and calf, or course I’d prefer to see a nice 60” bull, just so I know their there.