Holemaking

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Went ahead and rented a mini excavator for the Independence Day weekend. The rental of the excavator itself was pretty reasonable. The delivery/pickup for it was another story. But…my small truck probably doesnt have the oomph for a twenty foot trailer, I dont have experience navigating goat trails with a twenty foot trailer, and the last thing I need is to go through the humiliation and expense of getting a twenty foot trailer stuck on some insane switchback on the way to the property. To me, it was worth it to just throw money at it and transfer all that risk and work to someone else. I agree that this is a talent or skill I will need to pick up at some point, but for now…time can substitute for money, and money can substitute for time.

A ‘new’ truck is in the future at some point….Ideally something with the formerly-common-now-hard-to-find eight-foot bed, and a bit more gravitas for hauling heavy loads. But thats at a later date. RIght now, today, I need to get things rolling a little harder and a little faster. Starting this week the days are getting shorter and I’ve done pretty much jack in terms of getting a small structure set up there.

My needs on this holiday trip are stupid simple – two holes about 5-6 feet deep to contain the 500- and 750-gallon Roth Multitanks that I’m purchasing. Dimensionally, they only differ in length…one is about twice the length of the other ….five feet long and nine feet long. This means displacing …hm….51x62x60….four cubic yards for the tank itself and that doesnt include the areas immediately around it or the depth on top of the tank to the surface. About seven cubic yards for the larger tank.

Since I have a three day weekend at that time, it seems like a good time to camp out there. That should be an adventure, what with the bears and all. I need to start getting my list of things to take up there together. If I forget something, the nearest shopping is almost 90 minutes away.

And , in other news, I’m dropping a cashiers check at the surveyors tomorrow. Final price was 66~% of what my ‘worst case’ price would have been. But, it’s worth whatever it cost. I now have a very high level of confidence about what is and is not mine, and, more importantly, what is and is not someone elses.

Which reminds me…gamecam caught another trespasser. I’m already in contact with someone to  install a panel gate across the main-and-obvious entry onto the property. I suspect this was simply someone who drove up my road thinking it was just part of the network of roads up there and then had no choice but to continue to a point where he could turn around. I haven’t detected an malice or criminal intent in the two cases. I think they were just cases of people not really knowing they weren’t supposed to be there. But, I didnt spend that money to not have privacy. So…gate. Gotta get the budget setup for that, get some bids, and get that on the calendar.

Looks like summer will be the expensive season.

Tanks and AK’s

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Well, first off, here’s a little fella who I look forward to seeing real soon….

Todays trip was one of the more interesting ones. Hauling a 500 gallon Roth Multitank up there for future use. Managed to fit it into the back of my itty bitty pickup truck (although I had to turn the tank on its side) and get up there with no problem. However, it was a rather awkward and heavy object to get out of the back fo the truck by hand. Figured I’d just give it a shove and let gravity do the work. Smarter, not harder, yknow? Well, I lost control of it and it rolled off the back of the truck and right over my AK…

Managed to squash the corner of the magazine floorplate and ruin the mag. Here’s the kicker – I only brought one mag for the AK. I figure if I haven’t solved the problem with thirty rounds of steel core another mags worth aint gonna change things to a noticeable degree. So, there I am, in the middle of Beartopia, with a single shot AK. Bad survivalist!

So, what to do? Why, break out the ’emergency rifle’, of course. Reached behind the seat of the truck, opened the gun case, and pulled out the Green Meanie:

That one has eight spare mags with it, by the by. So…moral of the story…spare mag even if you think you wont need the extra ammo because you may just need the mag itself. And, as they say, unless you’re swimming or on fire you can’t have too much ammo.

So, rolled the Roth off the truck and looked like the Presidents escape pod from Escape From New York. (Note that the iamges show it laying on its side. That lid is the top of the thing.)

Size? Uhm… let’s see….

Height: 51″
Width: 62″
Length: 60″

The 750 gallon, which will be up there in two weeks, is same dimensions but 103″ long, which means it’ll hang out the back of my truck by a tad under three feet. Not too unworkable.

Still gotta get the equipment to bury these guys though. Here’s a cross section of what the terrain is like under the grass:

Lotsa shale-like rock. A guy at work wants to sell me this:

Needs a new starter switch assembly which can be had on Amazon for less than a hundred bucks. For a couple grand, it might be worth taking a chance on . It might not have enough cajones for larger projects but for small projects like trenching, post holes, etc, it might be worth it. However, If I wanna drop a good deal more coin he has a Case backhoe for sale….

Thatll do pretty much anything I want but its probably more than I need. To my way of thinking I only need it for a year or two until all my digging projects are done. Then it’s just money sitting idle. However, I am told that once you have a backhoe you discover a lot of uses you didnt know you needed. I imagine I could always sell it to the neighbors…there’s always that one guy living in the sticks that has his own road grade, bulldozer, or similar equipment.

Regardless, something has to happen and soon. In addition to needing to bury these guys, I need to get some holes deep in the ground for concrete piers for a little bare-bones cabin. Starting tomorrow the days get shorter and it’ll snow up there in probably another 10-12 weeks. Tempus fugit.

 

Survey says….

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Well, finally got my survey back from the surveyors. No bill yet, but I do have the coords of the markers and a lovely .kml file I can open in Google Earth that gives me some good info. Was there anything in there that was eye opening? Mmmm…no. And thats a good thing, isn’t it? The last thing I want is surprises.

Mathematically, I am within about 99.9% of the advertised acreage…any difference could easily be written up as a rounding error.  Some features that I was curious about are now proven to definitely be on my side of the property line. The only possible kerfuffle is that the barbed wire fence that ostensibly is the border of state land is probably a couple feet on the inside of the state land side of the border. But Id rather it be a couple feet inside their side of things rather than the fence being a couple feet into my side of things.

Not sure yet what the final cost will be, but whatever it costs is whatever it costs. The result is whats important. I know now, with reasonable and legal certainty, precisely where my realm does and does not extend to. More importantly, I know where my neighbors should and should not be.

Getting back in the habit

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Been so tied up in playing with the Beta Site that I forget not everyone really cares about that. What about the other day-to-day minutiae of survivalism?

Picked this up yesterday:

Its a 1 oz. gold Maple from one of the worlds last exporters of asbestos, acid rain, Biebers, and illegitimate children of Fidel Castro.

I sold a goodly chunk of precious metals last year and never really got back into the habit of regular purchasing to bring my stockpile back up. I very much need to change that. The way the economy of this country (which tends to defacto be the world’s economy) is going I really need to be bumping my silver and gold levels back up. So, when my buddy at the coin shop said he’d sell me this Maple at spot, I said sure. This particular specimen had a ding or two and some scratches. But…it’s still a solid ounce of the stuff that dreams are made of.

In addition to hedging my bets against inflation and whatever else the world has to throw at me, this will also come in handy if any of the neighboring properties to mine come up for sale. And until that time, I feel a lot calmer and secure knowing I’ve got precious metals sitting on the shelf ‘just in case’. So..back to the old buying habits.

Well, 200% more bear actually……..

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Same bear? Maybe, maybe not….looks kinda small. But the game camera picked up these shots last  night, just seven hours after Id been standing right there.

Am I worried? Not really. Black bears can, under certain conditions, be dangerous but so can any other animal. They are also not as notoriously hard to kill as a grizzly. My 10mm or AK ought to be just fine for this sort of thing. Just gotta keep my eyes open and exercise some common sense when it comes to having lunch up there.

Beta Site weekend..now with 100% more bear

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Brought the laptop this time. Connected to Starlink just fine. I brought it so I could more easily check some Google Earth stuff without the limitations of a phone. Normally, I’d throw in a lengthy post here but you’ll have to tune in later for an update. Got things to do, man…and daylights burning.

ETA:

And, apparently, a grizzly  black bear-of-color ate my game feeder. Thought it might be a griz but the snout is off, and the ass end is higher than the shoulders…

Time to bust out the old steel-core Norinco for the AK………

Weekend trip

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Well, there was much to do up at the Beta Site so lets start at the top….

StarLink seemed to work just fine up there. One nice thing was that it allowed text messaging to work up there, which was pretty cool. I ran it off a small lithium battery bank that I picked up at CostCo a while back. Setup was simple, signal was good, and speeds were quite good. All in all, it worked out just fine. I’ve got a Milwaukee Packout case that will have some foam cut to fit the Starlink and all its accessories. The StarLink Mini is quite the piece of gear to let me stay in touch with the rest of the world while being way the heck off the beaten path.

Of course, I wanted to check out the new property markers. I already knew where the old markers were and was curious to see where the newer. more modern, survery put the markers in relation to the old ones. Broadly speaking, there were all within a yard or two of the old ones. At least, 3/4 of them were. I found three of the new ones but when I went to check on the last one, only the old markers were there. No new flagging tape, no new cap, no new nuthin’. Im guessing they didnt finish the task that day and will be back this coming week. But…I went to all the markers and got GPS coords.

And, for better or worse, I had to spend some time posting signage:

It is what it is. I didnt spend all that money to not have privacy. And just to help me stay abreast of any unauthorized visitors while I’m ‘in residence’ I also have these:

IYKYK. I also have a wired set of these and a bunch of extra geophones which will be quite handy for other projects.

While wandering around the property looking for the new markers I wound up tromping through parts I had not been through yet. I mean, I still havent really wandered the entire width and breadth of the property. I kinda held off on doing that because I wasnt 110% sure where my property started and stopped. Well, different story now. While wandering I found a cool little meadow-like area that was literally surrounded by fallen dead trees and in the middle of this opening was a huge tree that was bent into a serpentine shape. It was like some sort of wooden Stonehenge. Had no idea it was there. I need to spend a weekend just meticulously walking a grid so I don’t miss all these details.

Also brought up the other 4×8 deck I built and bolted to the first one I brought up, so now theres and 8×8 platform up there for me to use when I’m up there and need a place off the ground for a tent or cooking.

All in all, a productive trip.

 

Surveyors on site II

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Well, I do have to give them credit…they said theyd be there today and…they were there today.

Apparently two of the corners aren’t an issue but they’re having to work a bit on the remaining two. I’m hoping this is all wrapped up by Friday so I can go up there this weekend and look at my lovely new property borders.