No pictures today

It was all I could manage to shovel the tank silt into the loader bucket while Hugh sat in it with the engine running. Taking time off to go get my camera out of the truck and ask him to photograph me shoveling didn't seem like a good idea at the time. I was just so glad to have the loader bucket to shovel into after all the weeks I spent shoveling into a five-gallon bucket and climbing out of the tank with it. The latter I did at 10 buckets a day, where this time I did all that was dried out in 2 hours. So it's a bigger workout for my body. I guess we did about 7 or so loader buckets full. Occasionally Hugh would climb out of the loader and shovel some so I could catch my breath, but it hurts his back real bad, even climbing in and out of the loader hurts him. (When he was young he was in an oil rig accident and broke his back. Now he has some fused discs.) He must love me a lot to be out in this heat shoveling for however long. There's still about 10 bucket loads left in the tank but they're mostly sludge now. The wildlife enjoy it. If it dries before it rains, we'll shovel it out.

After we got that done we loaded different dirt into the dump truck and I dumped it on bad spots on the road. It doesn't make a lot of difference and will wash away the first big rain, but it makes me glad to have it done. Right now the new dirt is powdery, but hopefully, we'll get a light shower one of these days so it'll settle in good. Then driving on it will pack it. And then rain will wash it away. It'll be worth it though. One year it started raining immediately after my late husband and I finished padding the road to perfection. Our work washed away really bad before we'd even had a chance to drive on it. Now I don't even try for a good road. I just keep the rocks picked up, try to keep the worst high center shaved off (for low-clearance vehicles of birders who visit), and the roughest spots patched a bit. It's never going to be a good road. When I built it 30 some years ago locals told me it wasn't possible to build a road between the canyon wall and arroyo on a mountain of solid rhyolite rock.  The impossible does take me a little longer to do. I'll take some photos of the road and post them soon. It's just one mile long.

I dozed on the way to Alpine today. Wednesday I'm going to go back down there and haul water to water my trees with. I'll be using the dump truck (no a/c) and I think I'll take a shorter route to the lodge for the water. It's about 6 miles versus 15 but it's all dirt road, whereas the other has 7 miles of blacktop. I came back that way on my last trip the other day and the road wasn't as bad as I remembered it, probably because my road used to be better, but now is worse. Everything is relative.