Working the land...

project from the week before.  This road floods really bad so I had to raise it and put a culvert under:

You have no idea.  hah
My wife and I have dreamed of moving to the country since we were kids and finally found the perfect place.  It's completely raw land on an old limestone rock quarry so we have a LOT of work to do.  We're hoping to start building a house next year, but it will depend on how all the infrastructure stuff goes this year.

haha, when I was driving down with a bucket of dirt I saw a big ole muskrat scoot along the road and jump into the water. 
We have a lot of beavers too that are mowing a lot of trees down.  Need to come to a diplomatic truce with them.

Listen to me on this because I fought a 6 year war with beavers at my dad's place.......and they nearly won and destroyed his dam.  THERE CAN BE NO TRUCE WITH BEAVERS!!

You can get trappers in there, but they won't get them all.

Make a small breach in their latest work.....big enough to get the water level dropping an inch every 6 hours or so.......do it in the morning.  That evening as it gets dark get set up and ready to shoot every beaver you can.  They will come to fix it, die, the survivors will retreat, and mount a 2nd wave of attack to fix the breach......have plenty of ammo and rations.

I'm only partially having fun with this......it's actually no fun at all when they start destroying your dam and the land around it.

My dad's property had a 3 acre lake.  We killed 9 beavers one Spring and 7 the next year.  There were no beavers for a couple years and then a big flood event got the spillway rocking and they re-established themselves.....and we had to send in troops for a 2nd tour of duty.

Oh.....and lest the faint of heart can't believe we killed those cute little critters......we killed 4 over 60 lbs.  Tree eating machines!

The interesting part for me is I can't for the life of me figure out where they're building their dams.  We have a spring fed quarry lake that's separated from another quarry lake by a piece of land.  I call it "the dam", but it's really nothing but a chunk of land between two lakes that I'm building up for the road.  It's rock/shale/dirt all the way down to the bottom of the lake so it's rock solid and has zero hydro pressure pushing against it.

So these beavers keep mowing down trees all over the place and they're hauling them somewhere but I can't find a single beaver dam anywhere because there's nothing for them to dam.  I don't know if they build them underwater or something weird like that, but I need to investigate further.  They could potentially have a cloaking device on the dams making it impossible for me to see them.

Since you did all that work which will change the water flow on your property.....you  may be about to find out. 

And yeah, mdg.....and it's gonna get closer to Caddyshack.  Since they passed away I have to sell their place......and the beavers are back and have caused quite a mess.  I'm thinking about speeding up the practice and blowing the spillway they have dammed up with tannerite.......then a massacre will ensue.

I love this stuff.  It's hard to explain, but when you work a desk job for a career it's really relaxing to do manual labor in the evenings/weekends. 

I built about a mile of fence last fall and this year is all about building roads and fixing all the water/erosion issues.

I have to cut a 20' wide road into a 30° bank to make a new driveway up to the highway and have to knock a hillside down about 15'.  It's like playing sim city in real life.

lol, i have no water flow to change.  It all comes in and out underground through the spring.  I wanted to lower the lake by a couple feet to build up my road, but there wasn't anywhere within 2000' that I could pump water to get it out of the lake.  It's just a big bowl.
I half wonder if they're trying to dam up the erosion runoff gully's, but I haven't seen any dams there.
You can rest assured though.  I have a particular set of skills and I will find them and I will kill them. 

If it's all just a big bowl, how do you end up with water on both sides of that road you raised?

When those bastages come for you......you're gonna need it. LMAOOOOO

It's an old rock quarry so everything's been moved around form the 1940's until the 1990's.  The two lakes (we own the bottom one) are separated by a chunk of land (think it's called an isthmus technically) along the property line, but there's no water flow between the lakes.

Talking to a geo technical engineer and he said a rock quarry is nothing more than a giant water well and our water level will be exactly where the water table is for the entire area.  The water comes in and out through cracks and fissures in the rocks below the water.  Because there's no sediment flow or anything like that the water is crystal clear and much cooler than your typical farm pond in the summer.  it's pretty cool.
The south side of the isthmus or land bridge as we like to call it is flooded currently because the water came up a few feet from where it was in this picture.  I plan to build up the entire bridge a good 4' over the water to keep it from topping again in the future.
There is a potential of one lake filling a little quicker than the other during a severe storm so I will put some culverts through the divide to ensure they stay even through the storm.

Hmmmmmmm......then the beavers truly are a mystery....but they have SOMETHING going if they are actively taking down trees.  How did the water level come up 2 feet from when the picture was taken?  Spring rains I assume?

I could also be that the beavers are a recent thing and they are just working on their lodge........if so, hell is coming.

There was another quarry just to the southwest of our lake that was being pumped dry until around 2009.  It was lowering the water table for the entire area.  When they finished quarrying it and let it fill up the other two lakes (ours and the one to the north) came up about 7' total from where they were in that picture.  It's a little bit of a guessing game, but it's been stable for the last couple years so my geo tech guy thinks it's likely about as full as it's going to get (give or take a foot or two with seasonal changes).

Here's an overhead I took from the north side looking south (our lake on top).  It shows the current state much better with the higher water.

Your geo guy doesn't know beavers.  I'm serious here.....when you are driving around your place in a truck, or on a tractor, or whenever.....have a rifle and kill any beavers you see.  If you don't, 2-4 years from now you won't recognize the work you're doing.  I'm going to hunt on my dad's place next week for a couple days on my way back North and I'll take some pictures of what they did to his road on top of his dam......absolute destruction .

interesting.  I have only seen them on my surveillance cameras at night.  I've never seen any during the day.
I saw that muskrat the other day which was the first one of them I've seen.