More Elk Fence Work

Ken started work on the inflow of the ditch. The neighbors cattle make a huge mess and destroy the ditch every summer so we are going to in metal culvert pipes up past the gate where the cattle walk and hope we can prevent the water loss that happens when they smash down the ditch sides.
First task was to dig out and measure the slope for everything.

Enos was back on Sunday and in about 2.5 hours he had cleared the entire north fenceline of rocks, put the loose rocks back on the rock wall and leveled the whole line. He is a very skilled equipment operator. Larry will be back on Monday and can start setting the corner posts of the north line and getting ready to put the line posts in.

New Loom

Erika came up from Albuquerque to teach a naalbinding class to members of the North Fork Fiber Guild (NF²G) and brought my new loom up from Santa Fe.

As she said, "All those years playing Tetris have finally paid off." She managed to get a Glimakra 4 shaft 60 inch wide countermarche loom into her van for the trip and still had room to spare.

This loom won't fit into any room in the house but will be installed in the upstairs of the new shop when its finally finished. I'm hoping to be able to weave unbalanced twill fabric on it eventually.

More Elk Fence

We're continuing to replace the old DOW elk fence around the orchard. L & S Mountain Fence is doing an excellent job for us. They did the elk fence we put around our front pasture and the lower fence around the back cedars pasture so we could safely put the horses out back in summer. Their first task was to take down the old fence. This section is along the north side of our property.

Ours was some of the first DOW fence put in in the North Fork. It was installed in 1981 and has long since passed the use by date. Many of the posts were rotten and the fence was very coyote porous.
We're replacing the section along the road on the inside of the rock wall. This is looking south along the fence line.

With all the old fence out the new corner posts were set and the line pulled to define where the posts will go for the rest of the fence. Here is the new corner post on the upper west corner of the property. We still hadn't cleared all the rocks from the north fence line so Larry continued with the west line. We'll be getting Enos back with the bulldozer to work on the north fenceline as soon as he can come.

With the line set Larry started to drill all the holes for the new fence with his heavy duty post hole digger. It's going to be a wonderful fence when it is finished!Larry got all the line posts set in concrete for the west section and is ready to start welding the braces on.