A drive down a logging road.

I drove out to my daughter's house today to do some more work on her greenhouse. After I finished what I was able to do, I decided to drive by the old homestead where I lived when she and her brother were growing up. We lived there for about 20 years before I left there. The old homestead is about 2-3 miles from where my daughter lives now.

After driving past the old homestead, I decided to take a drive down to what used to be a boat landing on the back waters of an old power dam that had been built around 1900 to provide power to an iron mine and the community around the mine. The dam was removed in the early 2000s, which drained the backwaters, now the boat landing is about 300 yards from the river that the dam had been built on. The last time I had been out there was the year after the dam had been removed, and the area was all mud. Now it has returned to swamp and stands of young trees. The only thing that remains of the boat landing site is the road circle at the end of the road.

When I started back from the end of the road, I noticed a newer logging road that had been bulldozed through the swamp and hills that surround the road, so I decided to explore it. The road had been built through the swamps by filling in a lane with gravel dug from the the area around the road. You could see where the gravel for the road had been taken from, there were several hills of glacial gravel to dig from. I don't think that the road was more than 1 year old because the logged over areas are just starting to grow back.

It didn't take too long to get to the end of the road, where they had stopped cutting the trees. I had to engage the four wheel drive to make sure that I got through a couple of the mud holes on the road, but they all seemed to be solid bottom holes because of the gravel. Once I got to the end of the road, I got out of my vehicle and walked around a bit, just to see what I could see. It was at that point that I decided to take a few pictures. I started at the end of the road. As you can see, they left all the big pine trees alone.

Looking back down the road, the way back.

One of the odd things about this area is that the bedrock is close to the surface in a lot of places, and has a lot of outcroppings. Because of this, the water can't sink very far into the ground, it can only go down hill. This is one of those places that has rock outcroppings surrounded by swamp. There's swamps on top of the hills as well as at the bottom. The road was built over several of these swamps, to gain access to the cedar and other trees that were logged out of the area.

I stopped and took several pictures of the road on the way back out to the main road. At the far end of the road in this pictures is one of the mud holes that I used the 4WD to get through.

Here's a good example of a bedrock outcropping surrounded by swamp. The road acts as a bit of a dam to back up the water into a small pond.

This is another spot where the road acted as a small dam, backing up the water that would otherwise have run down the slope into the swamp. There was at least 1 frog in this little pond.

A closer look at this pond shows that the water has found a way across the road and into the swamp. This little trickle will probably cut it's way through the road eventually and drain some of the pond.

The last picture was pretty close to where the logging road meets the main road, so that was the last picture that I took.

That's it for this post, I hope you enjoyed it!

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post, eh!

As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you'd like.

And don't forget, keep on steeming on!