More Bank Maintenance

Yesterday was spent on even more bank maintenance.  Palo Verdes, which are considered by many (including me) to be trash trees, are just the work of the devil.  Branches die off, little twigs die off, and they all turn into brittle black twigs armored with stickers.  Monday we're having another eight tons of rocks put on the bank.  We originally thought that we could just do half of the bank, but then that made the other half look tatty.  So rocks there will be from end to end.  It seemed stupid to dump all of those rocks on top of dead and dying vegetation and twigs so we spent several hours grooming the bank.  Everything down there has thorns, even the vines.  What makes it really difficult is that none of the rocks on the bank are anchored, they all move.  I feel that our proprioceptors have had a significant workout walking up and down the rocks, especially carrying a skill saw.  Dead branches were removed, twigs were raked up and removed, much was removed.  It does look way better.  At first we thought we could box the debris.  Nope.  We ended up with a 4 by 8 foot trailer and 100 pounds of branches and twigs.  Early afternoon it was off to the dump.

The dump is on the other side of town on surface streets.  It just took forever to get there.  It's a typical dump.

We were sent to the clean green section.  It's hard to tell, but that is a towering hill of biomass.

There's our trailer and part of our load.  Getting it out was a pain because all of those stickers and thorns had braided themselves into one giant mass of vegetation.  There's more on the other side of the trailer that you can't see. 

I think there are three more branches I want to take off the trees, and then after that we're declaring victory.

This was last night when the sun was setting.  The trash trees were being illuminated by the sun.  So was Bren peak in the background.

Today we were whooped, and did very little other than go to Target and Home Depot.  We're looking for a bug zapper.  I was out admiring the bank last evening and got three mosquito bites while I was out there.  Reviews are mixed on Amazon, ranging from kills everything to kills nothing.  A little consistency would be good.

Trees in the Target parking lot.  Palo Verde on the left, Mesquite on the right.  Mass quantities of pollen.

It hit 98 today.  The air now has that "sitting in an oven" feel to it.  I am really going to miss residential air conditioning when we leave for the summer.