trail happy

A major reason for purchasing a piece of land the size we had, was so that we would have plenty of room for riding ATVs and dirt bikes.  We now had the land, but it was completely wooded, so a trail would have to be cleared before we could make use of it. Dave was completely psyched when one of our neighbors put him in touch with a fellow who lived nearby that might be able to help us out.  He happened to own a John Deere 333D excavator with a Loftness Carbide Cutter attachment that will tear down trees and grind up anything in its way, creating an 8′ wide path as it moves along.  Though it looked like a lot of fun to use, Dave opted to have Todd do the job for us.  Dave had been down the weekend prior and marked the area for our trail and, having received word that it had been mostly cleared, we were anxious to drive down to the lake and check it out.  Todd had said he still had a bit of clearing left to do, but the trail was mostly complete.

Check out this video clip of a carbide cutter in action….how much fun does this look?!  (This was not filmed on our property.)

Undaunted by the fact that it had been raining for days and days and knowing that the ground would most likely be a bit muddy, we headed down early Sunday morning with the hopes of doing a test run.  We also wanted to see how the new dock had faired with all the recent rain.  We were not surprised to find the water spilling over the dam as we drove up to the lake.

Happy to find that the dock had withstood the high waters, we turned our attention to what we had really come down to do.  We suited up and hopped on our vehicles.

We  crossed over Colemans Lake Rd and headed over to the other side of the property to see what we would find.  We drove directly into the entrance of the new trail without considering that we might want to check it out before bringing Max along on his dirt bike.  Probably not an awesome parenting decision.  The path was extremely slippery, very rough, and still had stumps protruding from the ground as well as broken branches hanging down from the trees above.  Max lasted about half way into woods before refusing to go any farther.  I had been following behind on my ATV keeping an eye on him and could see that he was having difficulty, so was somewhat relieved when he wanted to turn around and go back.  Dave, too, was happy enough to take his own dirt bike back and trade it in for the ATV.  We rode Max back to the truck where he happily sat playing on his iPad while Dave and I went back to check out the rest of the trail atop the much more stable ATVs.

We had much fun on the ATVs, but definitely need to wait till the trail is cleared completly before taking the dirt bikes back out!  Once we’d explored as much of the trail as we could, we headed in, cleaned off as much of the mud as possible and called it a day.