How to use natural bridges
One
thing Mike and I learned quickly on our land was that when you’re
building or repairing something, it doesn’t have to look pretty; it
just has to work. We took this philosophy to heart when
installing bridges in our woods.
Of our seven acres,
approximately one was a woodlot that hadn’t been messed with since the
first cut, probably in the 1930s when the house was built. Our
entire property sloped from the highway (our east border) westward,
toward the White Salmon River, and this woodlot was at the
bottom. Since our parcel was basically in the middle of a
half-mile slope from the top of the 1,000-foot ridge to the east and
the river, water moved through at a pretty good clip during the winter
rains and spring thaw.
The result: “water events,”
a euphemism that we grew to dread. As I mention in Get Your
Pitchfork On: The Real Dirt on Country Living:
Our woodlot was on its way
to becoming a ravine, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying it in the
interim. Bushwhacking was difficult and hard on the understory,
so Mike took on the project of establishing a few trails through the
woods.
If you combine the idea of
installing paths and the reality of water picking and choosing its
courses through the woods, you see the issue: we had to cross
swales. We didn’t want to build actual, arched bridges for a
couple of reasons: we wanted to maintain a natural feel in this little
forest, and with every “water event” changing the width and course of
each swale, we might build a great bridge only to have it fall into the
swale the following spring.
So, we decided to work with
the materials at hand: boards from the woodpile and downed trees.
These extra boards that were
lying around the barn worked for a while …
We repositioned this broken
piece of Douglas fir to traverse a particularly boggy spot, stabilizing
it on the ends with rocks so it didn’t roll back and forth
Very considerate of this
cedar to fall and help us cross this section!
Where the ground was mucky,
we laid dozens of 2- to 4-inch-thick sticks across the trail to give us
purchase
Kristy
Athens’ nonfiction and short fiction have been published in a number of
magazines, newspapers and literary journals, most recently Culinate,
Jackson Hole Review, High Desert Journal, and Barely South
Review. She is the author of Get Your Pitchfork On!: The Real
Dirt on Country Living (Process Media, 2012), which was reviewed on The
Walden Effect in October.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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