When HA and I were first buying what would become Twoprops’ gated compound, I walked the entire perimeter of the land and surveyed the fences and much of the interior. I didn’t have appropriate protective clothing to go into the gulch, and in the northwest corner of the land the vegetation was too thick to hike through in the time I had. For the most part, though, I saw all of it.
Since moving here, I still haven’t gone into the gulch. There’s also about an acre on the west side of the property that was fenced off for horses, which we will never, ever, ever have. Oddly, there is no gate in the fencing and no obvious place where one used to be. The land was pretty obviously cleared about 15-20 years ago, and has since been left fallow. There is a lot of brush, a few beautiful native trees, and a lot of guava (basically weeds around here). I can think of many ways to use the land, but the first step is being able to get to it without having to climb a fence. The Hired Hand just put in a gate, so we’ll be able to access it and start assessing its future (which will not include horses).
There is a lot of dense vegetation and some steep hills in the northeast corner of the compound. We recently had much of the property cleared with a brush mulcher, and that has exposed some of the wilder parts of the land that I hadn’t been able to explore in depth. Adventures await!
The last undiscovered country is the gulch. It’s quite deep in places, the walls are steep, and there isn’t a lot of good access, at least from the pasture side, since we built the fence to keep the pigs out. It’s still very wild jungle. Our next fencing project is to put a gate in the new fence (which will require undergrounding our fiber optic link to the studio). At that point, I’ll have to don protective clothing and a belay line and descend into the gulch. Lore says that there is even a lava tube down there. Perhaps I’ll do some spelunking and find a place on the gated compound for a secret lair.
—2p