Yggdrasil Springs

Walk the dogs while clearing a trail

That line is copied from my weekly schedule, and it is the whole idea. The walk is not the warm-up for the work. The walk is the work.

Every morning at six the dogs and I go out, and a trail comes back clearer than it was. Path maintenance and fire prevention are the practice here, not the chores we fit around it.

The Butte Fire came through in 2015. The standing dead trees in these photographs are from it. Clearing fuel is why this work exists, and doing it slowly, on foot, every morning, turns out to be the part worth keeping.

Three hours in, the only thing in my head is the next hundred feet of trail. Nothing here is urgent, and the list is long enough that none of it is late.

The land has names

Eighty acres at 2,300 feet, in Mountain Ranch, Calaveras. Most of the names here are Norse, because our ancestors were Vikings.

The trails are named and the signs are being engraved: Bifrost, Mimir's Creek, Elverhoj, Land's End, Bianca's Cutoff, the Fountain of Youth. Big Falls and Buckeye Falls run year round. Midgaard is where the cats live.

The Garden of Idunn is an orchard planted so the harvest never stops: Methley plum at the very start of the season, Granny Smith at the end, and something ripening in most of the weeks between.

Come and clear a trail

Yggdrasil Springs is open by invitation. If this sounds like your kind of morning, write to me and tell me why.

Photos by Yggdrasil Springs