It was too cold to ride my bike much yesterday, so I ran my trail instead. When it warmed up a bit later in the day, I could not resist the call to go out and hack at it some more.
By some blind luck, I happened to stumble along the route which gave me the fewest thorn vines to cut. Using my ancient swing blade and machete in turns, I crossed the grassy area in less than an hour, to make another 50 yards or so. That put the trail at its northern-most reach. Along the road cut through the sandstone ridge, I got an easy 50 yards where the grass grew only in patches on the bare soil. The last patch before turning back into the woods again broke the old swing blade. The hardened steel blade snapped just off the attachment point. Since it was 20 years old, I hardly mourned the loss.
That left me another hour to begin plowing into the woods again. This particular stretch will be about 300-400 yards of hard work. It’s nothing but dead-fall and underbrush — the red bark saplings and thorn vines tangled tightly. I estimate this will require some 20 man hours to finish. Barring surprises, there won’t be much to report for awhile. The target at the other end is a sloped patch of grass mixed with some of the same underbrush I’ve been whacking at all along.
The bonus is, at this point, I can turn off my trail onto the plowed road bed, which has been cut down into the ridge line. The road bed is mostly rock, and what little soil there is offers little fertility, so the vegetation is sparse. I can jog down this road to the dam between ponds, cross over to the far east side of the acreage and follow a well used four-wheeler path out onto the main highway to the south. If I climb up onto that highway there, I avoid the sensitive issue of being seen in the “forbidden zone” near the wastewater lagoon. In all, it would be a decent exercise loop roughly 2.5 to 3 miles long.
The initial goal has been achieved.
