Moving and Initial Site Preparation

A few months before moving we purchased and fixed up a 35-foot fifth-wheel trailer. This would be our temporary home until the new one was ready. We guessed it could be as long as a year. That turned out to be one of our biggest miscalculations. In any event, a week in advance of the move I had towed the trailer to within 35 miles of the new property. Eventually the big day came, our house was sold and all of our possessions were loaded into a rented moving truck.  I drove that, and Barbara drove our van, which was packed to the gills with the breakables and the cat.

We had previously arranged a barter deal with a rock-screening company to do some earth moving to improve the access and the building site. But they never did anything much more than talk, so eventually we just paid one of the guys to do the work with rented equipment. We commuted from the trailer in town for a week while the trail was improved to a condition good enough to allow us to drag the trailer up the mountain. Despite having flipped the trailer axles for more ground clearance, its rear bumper still dragged in the dirt on a few of the hills. Still, it was home at last. We kept the rented bulldozer long enough to rough out a house pad, but the bulk of the site work was to wait until we could get our own equipment.

Road and Runway

Not too long after moving onto the property we bought an old motor grader. After a few repairs it was ready to work, or so I thought. In short order a couple of poorly welded items fell apart, and I had to re-do the repairs properly. Welding and mechanical skills are definitely needed to keep old junk like this operational. I scratched away at the road, which must be about 70% rock, until I’d broken and repaired most of the weak points on the machine. After a while, it actually started to seem reliable (an illusion, let me assure you). With the kind of material we had to work with, a dozer, loader, screen, dump truck, water truck, and a grader would be the preferred combination of equipment. But the grader was all we had at the time, so I did my best. Improvement was gradual and apparent mostly to ourselves. Visitors would get out of their vehicles either laughing or cursing. But it was getting better. The 35-mile trip to town included six miles on the new road, and we could now make it in about 45 minutes which was much quicker than before.

We had been living on the property for close to two years and had the new building roughed in. But we were still renting hangar space at the local airport for our small homebuilt aircraft, so the airstrip moved up the priority list. We found an old bulldozer to buy for not much more than its scrap value. The transmission was kaput so I rebuilt that at home, and installed it at the seller's location. Once I got the machine (barely) mobile, we transported it by truck to the bottom of our mountain. But that last four miles under its own power was a long trip. The heads were cracked, so it could only drag its 25 tons about an eighth of a mile at a time without overheating. Once I got it home I replaced the heads and caught up on the worst of the neglected repairs.

Finally I could do some serious earth moving. I rode the bucking hulk of iron most every day for a couple of months, and scratched out an airstrip. Normal routine was to run the dozer for a few hours in the early morning, then make any repairs so that it was ready to go the following day. I’m sure the ratio of maintenance hours to operational hours was right up there with that of air force fighter jets. So don’t try using old equipment like this unless you’re prepared to invest the sweat equity.

Once the strip was improved sufficiently I flew the plane home. Then I spent another couple of weeks on the dozer making some major changes to the road. By that time, we were actually entitled to call it a road. It can be driven mostly at 35 mph so long as you don’t have stiff suspension or a weak heart. This reduced the driving time to our first shopping trip stop to a scorching 35 minutes. Visitors from the city are still a little incredulous sometimes, but those with dirt-moving experience realize that it’s a major accomplishment. Each time the road is graded it gets a little better, although it will never be a superhighway. So if you’re looking at doing something similar there's a lesson that you can learn from our experience. That is, no matter how tough it looks it can be done, if you’re motivated and not in a hurry.

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