It took a good chunk of time in 2017 and into 2018 but i got the hillside and the valley cleared out and bushhogged so grass started started taking over. It was alot of the same - cutting, chainsaw, pushing into piles and burning. Cant remember how many hours but it was a ton. Luckily, i am sorta weird in the way that clearing land is extremely personally satisfying and rewarding.

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About 100 yards up the valley from the old pond site, there was a huge area of tangled vines, old slash piles, and overgrown vegetation that looked swamp-like, except on a small hill.

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After cutting the big stuff and beginning to move it, one fairly dry and uneventful day i was nosing in to grab a bucket full of cuttings and the front end dropped to the frame rails. I was able to back it out with the FEL and the backhoe assistance but left a deep, soupy and muddy mess of a hole under what used to be a maze of vines. It started to all make sense after the hole filled with water in 30 minutes.

I took the backhoe and dug out a 4x4x7' deep pit, once again it filled in about an hour. Perhaps an old spring site had been uncovered, and in a great place to just drain down the hill and into the pond.

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I made a mental note and continued on into the old pond site.

A few words about uncovering old trash dumpsites. Good Lord, there is a lot of trash. This county is notorious for the last 50 years of very little landfill use. I found at least 4 fairly good sized dump sites in the 3 acres i cleared. Filled a good 18' trailer twice. Still finding junk to this day.

Ok, old pond site.
You can see the trees have taken hold and grown well. A few of those poplars were a solid 60-65' tall. I ended up dropping all of them over a long span of time. Had a few milled up into boards, cut a solid 6 or so cords of the hardwoods for firewood, and ended up burning a few giant piles when i just got sick of spending so much time processing wood. Some of the stumps were removed, some left for habitat. (A bigger piece of equipment would have helped here, and with the depth as explored later on)

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You can see standing water in the old pond bottom depending on the time of year that some of these pictures were taken.

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On the far side is where the old low dam/berm (about 3' tall) had been breached at some point so on gullywashers, the water would drop into the pond bottom and fill to maybe 8" before spilling out the breached site.

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I am not one to reinvent the wheel so the plan was to improve and deepen this site, cut a little more uphill to make the island, raise the dam, fix the breach and any other part of the existing berm/dam, make an emergency spillway and call it a day.

More cost, add in:
Fuel - $150ish
Chains - ebay, a bar and 2 chains for $49, lots of sharpening time.
Tractor tire patch from a nail/200 hour service - $145
First aid - free ice packs, advil and bandages $30
My time - lots and lots. But i consider it in exchange for going to the gym, and extremely satisfying so for me it is a wash. But it was hundreds of hours.

Thoughts looking back - yes, bigger equipment and i would have easily been done by this point in time. But for me it goes back to doing stuff on my own instead of writing a check for someone else to do it. Pride maybe. Personal satisfaction. Something like that. I dig figuring out how to do something and then doing it. Even if it is wrong at first and i have to correct it. Its a learning and experience thing for me. In the end it has done us well. We have remodeled a few houses we have lived in over the years and taken on more and more jobs that we used to hire out. By now, we are satisfied with our work and can do it fairly well. The house we are in now was probably in total a $75,000 remodel that cost us out of pocket a third of that as we did most of the work ourselves. Sweat equity is my obsession.

But 100% agree, this is the hard route.

Next up, the site is clear of trees and start the dirt work
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