On the Road

What do you do when you return from Antarctica and find that someone has built a road across your property? 

Take a look here–the left arm of the yellow symbol is our property corner and the right one is where the road footing starts–a full 10 feet!  Plus the road was built 3 feet higher which necessitated a 60′ fill into my drive and the steepness increased from 10% grade to 20%.   We were denied access all winter which is bull***t!  And it gets better–my uphill neighbor with the steep poorly designed driveway (a park ranger buddy whom I introduced to Saddle Butte) engineered this by putting their electrical service box 7 feet into the easement forcing the road into my property.  The road engineer bought this tripe and built the road over my property instead.    And my neighbors being on the uphill side got the better deal and driveway–they signed no easement–why should they?  It’s easier to steal!  Who paid for this?  I did through my landowners dues of which THEY ARE THE PRESIDENT!!!  Well, here’s how Doug handles these situations:

I hire a couple of good old local boys who instantly understand the problem (there was no shortage of backhoe drivers willing to do this chore).  At 3am I had these two expert excavators ripping this road up so I could gain access to my property.  This was after seven months of letters and stonewalling from their lawyers.  Who are these people?  Big Texas Oil money?  No, it’s Ware and Worrell developers who are ridge-lining the summit of Saddle Butte in the south-center of Jackson Hole.  This is like fighting Haliburton (maybe it is??).  The county attorney, who visited the site last year just shook his head and repeated “unbelievable” over and over when his road specialist informed us that it is easier and therefore cheaper to dump the spoils downhill on road construction–that is…..my property. 

Well, I look at this as an opportunity.  This has been more fun than when my brothers and I blew the pitchers mound off the little league field with some purloined dynamite in the early 1960s.  (It was attributed in the newspapers to flying saucers).  Take a look at what two backhoes can do in just three hours–here it is 6am:

This is beautiful!  And since there is all this easement space on the other side of the road, well it’s a natural place to stuff all this dirt.  Can you imagine what idiots would design and dare to build a road like this? Answer:  Rendezvous Engineering and Seaton Construction of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  A one lane road to a multi million dollar development—truely unbelievable!  

We removed approximately 200 cubic yards of earth that was illegially dumped on our property.  And after asking them to remove it last October, they dumped four additional large boulders up against some aspen trees as a retaining wall.  All in all, they killed or buried 39 trees–we discovered today three more buried stumps!  This is a treble damage state, I believe and at $2000 per tree X 3 X 39, this is amounting into a battleground for us.  But this is Jackson Hole, which has the highest per capita income in the United States, where billionaires are running out the millionaires and you can find a house with 27 fireplaces or a $10M spec house above my house.  Opps, without a road, it won’t be worth $10 million.  Now would you piss off the person who lived in front of your view?? 

I launch the helium blimp on Monday….stay tuned….. 

The junk pile daily grows with refuse that will be transported back across the Wrangell Narrows and then to the dump.  Makes one think seriously of recycling.  Ten acres of junk accumulated over 50 years is a bit daunting.  Buried in the heaps are 50+ broken axe handles, dozens of funnels, spare parts still in their wrappers, blasting caps, a complete veterinary hospital, one beautiful Norwegian hand-carved ski dating 1900, dozens of 55 gallon barrels, about 50 gaff-hooks, and spare parts to last a lifetime–only if that lifetime was frozen in history.  Trouble is, everything is outdated, rusted, broken, incomplete, useless and takes up space.

 I forgot to mention the “walk behind” tractor; a 1962 Gravely which was built by the Studebaker company complete with a rear-end differential and over 60 attachments.  I’m trying to find a snow blower and log splitter.  Never mind the brazing on the cylinder and other missing parts. This is a real classic–can’t you see this in the Ballard, Seattle, 17 of May parade pushed by a fat guy wearing a fez??  And here is a 14′ skiff:

and….

This is a real beaut!  Fourteen feet and 75 years of dust and cat litter inside the hull.   These photos are taken after scraping, removing loose ribs, reefing the seams, etc.   Stay tuned for upgrades on this vessel–I plan to enter it in the Norway Festival this May here in Petersburg–well, maybe next year.

Here’s another gem–know what this might have been–the whole property is filled with this stuff….here’s another:

Stay tuned….I’m going to spend all spring and summer digging this stuff out of the weeds.  Want to help out?  Just send me an email at mail@dougleen.com and I’ll put you up in the guest cabin on the point…..which will be featured next week when I finish cleaning it out!……