West side corral, day 2

Friday it rained most of the day, so no corral work.

Saturday morning started out with a thick inversion.  I checked the Glacier Park Apgar Peak web cam and found it truly was an inversion.  Above the fog the sky was clear blue.  In the Valley the inversion didn't burn off until early afternoon.

It was almost 2 pm by the time I started work on the corral.  I finished around 7 pm.  Subtract an hour to check and move pocket gopher traps (I caught 2 more gophers), and that didn't leave long for corral work.

Time was also spent looking for more boards to nail to the posts.  The "old" corral only had three boards and then the snow fence.  I wanted more than three boards, especially as I am leaning away from putting the snow fence back up.  Six boards would go to the top of the railroad ties and I decided on five boards as minimum.  I can add the sixth board later if I had enough boards left and/or the desire to add a sixth.

2 by 4s, 2 by 6s, 1 by 6s, etc. of all lengths were all mixed and stacked together and I had to spend time go through stacks to find the 2 by 6s in 8 ft lengths that I wanted.

One would think I would only need eight more boards as I had twelve already, but no, the distance between old posts were not always eight feet.  Two sections were eight feet, one section was a little over seven feet and one section was almost 9 feet.  I planned on making each of the rebuilt sections eight feet which meant some of the old boards were too short.

Also slowing me down was my care in digging the hole for the first railroad tie post.  Lots of rocks had been placed around the old post when it was put in place and that slowed my digging down.  Mainly I took care I had everything right before I slid the railroad tie into the hole.  This tie was the one I had to "walk" to this spot as it was too heavy for me to drag.  I had one chance to get its position right as I would not be able to lift it out of the hole for adjustments.

The hole had to be

• in line with the fence line, 

• positioned right at eight feet so the boards would reach the railroad tie but not exceed it,  

• to be the right depth at 30 inches and level at the bottom so as to not cause the railroad tie to lean sideways.

And the good side of the railroad tie had to face outside the corral.

Whew. No wonder I checked and double checked and triple checked and waited before I finally lifted the railroad tie until it slid into the hole with a mighty thud.

Perfect.

Is he reaching for China?  No, just to the bottom of the hole to get the last of the dirt and rocks out at the 30 inch level.

Oh.. by the way, also slowing me down was when the horses came to "help".

What is it with buckets and livestock?  I only had nails in the bottom of the white bucket so I wasn't too concerned when she put her head in the bucket.  When she came up with a mouth full of nails I got concerned.  She did spit them out and I had to pick them up.  Photo 2 is me getting the "eye" after taking the bucket away from her.

Then she turned to the sledgehammer.  Now what could she do with that?  She tried lifting it but it was too heavy.  Then she turned her attention to the tip of the handle.  This time, since she couldn't lift the sledgehammer, she started chewing on the handle.  *argh!* Stop it!!!

I had to take the sledgehammer away from her.  I had to take everything way from them as the other filly ran off with a spare rope I had and another horse wanted to take my coat.  Not to mention they slobbered over everything else.

Go away!

Finally they did.

A jet flew high overhead after I got the railroad tie in place.

Since it is usually dusk when I quit working and take a photo of my day's results, I decided to take a photo before I started to contrast with the end day's photo.

As you can see, I have one section done and the second post removed.  That's all I got done.