Roadwork and Recreating

“Recreate” in this blog post doesn’t mean to create something for a second time – it means to engage in recreation, or having fun in leisure time.

We drove up the hill to Mineral King to close the cabin and shut off the water for the season. Trail Guy held the gate for a convoy of 6 fire vehicles from Kings County.

Some crews “brushed” (this means “pruned” in normal people language) around the cabins. Because we lease our land from the National Park Service, we are not allowed to do this important maintenance chore. Apparently another agency pulled rank on the NPS. They are not landscapers – just energetic strong people who are doing a job to make a community more fire safe.

They limbed trees to prevent “laddering” by fire – we’ll need to trim these stubs next year.
They left a lot of little stumps.
I sawed off one that was a real tripper.
They didn’t drag the brush away.

I am just reporting – not criticizing. I am curious how the Park will view these actions, and hope they just say “Thank you!”

Then there may have been a wee bit of recreating. We needed to do something to stay out of the way while the main men finished closing.

Then it was time to head down the road. The amount of brushing and shredding on the county part of the road (from the Oak Grove Bridge down) was astonishing – 4 or 5 crews, rumored to be from Mexico. Look at the “broom” they are using in the bottom photo.

This has been sorely needed for many years. 

Thank you, energetic fire crews! We appreciate you and your consistent hard work. Thank you for saving Three Rivers and Mineral King from disaster in this bizarrely disastrous year.

 

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5 Comments

  1. Thanks so much for sharing the pictures. Can’t wait til next spring and all this is behind us. This work is so important. We have been following the fire as well as air quality for Three Rivers. We have so happy to see it so much improved over the past two weeks, since we closed our cabin on October 9th.

    • Thank you for checking in, Tom and Linda. I have appreciated your staying in contact throughout this year, with your positivity and encouragement!

  2. Sometimes you just have to pull rank on organizations that, shall we say, may be busy with other tasks (I’ll cut ’em some slack, here). I’m glad they did, and I guess we’ll have some clean-up to do next summer. But I love energetic strong people keeping a community safe, too. And that goes for the cabin community, and along the lower road!

    • Sharon, I’m glad they did the pruning around the cabins, even if we will have to do some clean up next year. And the lower road has needed this attention for decades!

      • As you know the lower part of the road is not NPS, it’s Tulare County. I wonder if anyone had brought this need to their attention before? It’s not exactly one of the more well-traveled roads in the county!


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