More trail and road making

More trail and road making

Parker makes short work of the dreaded bushes with a pocket saw.

The handiest trail maintenance tools fit right in your pocket. The little bottle is an eye-dropper type, full of straight RoundUp. The pocket saw can quickly cut down anything up to about an inch. The clippers are handy for small stuff.

The best trick to loading your little drip bottle is a pump bottle as an intermediate. You can pour from the Roundup container into the pump bottle, then pump into the drip bottle. (Other good bottles are ketchup squirters.) Next let’s look at 3 ways to use it – on grass lawns, on small trees, and on big trees.

The first two shots show putting a wee drop on just one or two leaves of a weed in a lawn. These drops of death should not touch the good grass. (If you flub it you can wash it off immediately. The stuff is biodegraded in the soil and won’t hurt anything unless it goes on a cut root or something.)

The last shot (different lawn) shows how exquisitely selective you can be. Drops were put on the blades of the crab grass 11 days ago. Note the crab grass is toast, but the good grass (El Toro) right next to it is unscathed. (To the right is a living crab grass that was not treated.)

Now let’s move on to small trees, which is more like what you do in trail making. In the center of the picture is a weed tree in some ground cover. (If you sprayed this tree you’d kill it, but also some of the ground cover. You’d also have a dead tree for a year or two.) With clip ‘n drip you just put the Roundup on the stump after cutting it down. (For the picture I left the stump high so you could see it – barely, it is in the center of the picture - normally the stub would be cut at ground level.)

My favorite permanent markers are “Formica” chip samples you can get for free at your local building store. The string is colored mason’s line (nylon) which lasts forever. (Ideally hang on a small branch, using a big loop of string, or otherwise not cinch the tree.) The marking can be pencil or my favorite, a “China marker” or “grease pen”, which you can find at a drafting store.

Trail making often starts when there is a pretty cool spot to get to, like this cliff by the swinging bridge. Ben and Parker could get there OK, but there were a few sticker bushes in the way.

Here are a few more examples of “clip ‘n drip” bottles. In the crafts department you can find “cloth paint” or various glitters in great little bottles with sort of needle noses. These are my favorites. Or glue bottles. Or fingernail paint bottles (marginal - harder to clean, and I like tiny drips more than brushing).

Rather than just toss the cloth paint, it can be used to make vivid trail markers. Not sure how long these last, tho, so while testing I still use the tried and true grease pen. (This marker is for the A trail, 20 paces from the beginning.)

Sometimes you need to cut down real trees. This is always the case in making roads. Since I wanted to drive on the road as soon as I made it, I started cutting the stumps super short. First cut the tree down normally, then the stump is dug out a bit with the small pick. (There is always a mound around trees.) Once I moved the dirt and rocks, I wailed with the chainsaw, half expecting to dull the chain. Nothing noticeable so far. And this is far easier than burning a stump.

The vertical cuts help get rid of the stump, both by collecting water to rot it, or if you are burning later they help the fire.

For clip ‘n drip with a big tree you only have to put the sauce on the new bark up next to the wood. (These are the phloem tubes, which go down to the roots. The main wood is xylem tubes, which take water up to the leaves.)

Quick fire shot – notice the vertical cuts are full of flames on this old stump. This was a long dead stump, fairly easy to burn, but the cuts are still a huge help.

Temporary markers are ideally big and wave in the breeze. The first stage of trail or road making is usually setting up a crude line of sight. In the picture you can see a red lumber store flag in the foreground, and if you look carefully you may see a faint one off in the distance. In this case I am making a road (so far called “red flag road”- clever, eh? - , on the back third). I knew where I wanted the road to begin and end, but the woods are so thick every time I’d try to walk from one to the other I’d end up wrong. So I hung the red flags at each end, then made a few passes back and forth - with either the pocket saw or the chainsaw, and eventually got the line of sight.

Most trails in the deep woods are just a matter of raking. Here are before and after pix of a little trail.

Raking marks the trail, and it gives you good footing (there are the occasional holes where a tree died, stumps, and loose rocks that will be exposed when you rake).

On to next page (poison ivy)

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