About
Why the land is kept the way it is.
What this place is for
Eighty acres kept in a condition where somebody can arrive from a city, pick up a tool, and spend a morning doing something the land actually needs.
That is the whole intent. Not a spa, not a workshop, not a program. The work is real, the trail is genuinely clearer at the end of it, and whoever cleared it goes home knowing which trail.
No cars, and the whole sky
There is not a car to be heard from anywhere on this property, at any hour. That is the first thing people mention, and it takes about a day to stop listening for it.
I know the phase of the moon every night, because it is the difference between walking a trail in the dark and carrying a flashlight. The Milky Way is overhead all year, and most days here are clear, right through fall and winter.
None of that was installed. It is what is left when the noise and the light are taken away.
…and the skies are not cloudy all day.
Home on the Range
Why there is work to do
The Butte Fire came through in 2015. The standing dead trees in every photograph here are what it left, and taking fuel off this land is why the work exists.
Trails get cleared. Ladder fuel comes off the trees. Dead wood comes down and gets carried away, because fuel on the ground is still fuel.
It is slow, physical, and finishable. At the end of a morning I can see exactly what I did. After twenty years of work whose results were invisible by design, that is not a small thing.