We were so excited to get started at last! Our first
order of business was to get water and power
(and TV and Internet) to the property; this involved digging a five-foot
deep trench from the nearby highway along a 2,700-foot long dirt road to our
property. I use the term ‘road’ loosely here since it was more of a goat track
formed over the years by people repeatedly driving back and forth to access
other nearby properties and the mountains and canyon area behind our
property.
We had to accomplish a lot in
one week since that was all the time that my husband and I could take off from
our jobs: pick up the spool of
communication wire (TV/Internet/phone) from Panguitch, a little town about one
hundred miles away; dig two trenches, one for the pipe and communication wire
and the other for the electrical; stake the location of the cabin and future
main house; and, last but not least, meet with local building contractors to
discuss, and hopefully obtain, quotes to build the cabin.
It was a week filled
with long, hot, dusty days, hard work, lots of little annoying flies (‘no
see-ums’)--- and lots and lots of rocks, from the size of my foot to the size
of my car. The contractor that we hired
to help dig the larger trench for the water dug up hundreds of medium and large
boulders, which very soon lined both sides of our entry drive from our property
to the highway. With our time there so
limited, we were only able to move a portion of them back to our property. Our plan is to gradually get them all moved
to our property—or give them to someone who needs some extra boulders (hah!,
this part of Utah is one large pile of boulders).
We worked from dawn to sundown, which was
around 8:30 PM, and usually ate our dinner around 9 or 10 at night; very
exhausting and tiring and dirty, but rewarding as well because we were able to accomplish everything we needed to, and we were doing it on our beautiful
property!
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View of the sunset from our trailer-- lucky us! We get to camp on our property. |
Placing and
orienting our cabin and house on the property was easy because no matter where
you looked, there was an amazing view:
Boulder Mountain to the south; the Henry Mountains and the tops of the
Capitol Reef rock formations to the south and east; Thousand Lake Mountain to
the north; and nearer rock formations and canyons to the west.
My job was, in addition to running into
nearby towns to get more fuel for the equipment, buy groceries, and buy tools and
supplies, was to operate the small bobcat (a first for me!) that we rented to
smooth and ‘finish’ the surface of our entry road after the trenches had been
filled in again.
As I struggled to learn
how to run the bobcat (I’m happy to say my learning curve was steep—I was a
fairly good equipment ‘operator’ at the end of the week) I would stop every once in a
while and look around at the dusty green of the junipers and pinyon pines, the
varying grays and gray-greens of the sagebrush and grasses, the red cliffs across the Fremont River valley, and the wide, blue, blue sky above,
and think to myself that this was probably one of the best vacations I’d had in
a long time. I couldn’t remember the
last time I’d felt this ‘in-the-moment’ and happy.
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We have water! |