Saving the world....one cow at a time...

While in Montana our group of thirty was split into several smaller groups of five or six and sent to various locals to work on different wilderness projects.  We call these trips spikes.  Each spike spends a few days on their own either camping or living in cabins while working on their projects.  I was in a group with Claire, Amelia, Saul  Travis and Luc.  

We were on a fencing project near the hot springs at Elkhorn Cabins.  Each day we hiked in all our our equipment and tools almost a mile to our work site.  Our job which took us almost five days was to construct a divide in order keep cows from crossing into a different pasture on another half of a valley.  To do this we had to construct a natural barrier of felled trees down the steeper side of the valley.  The natural barrier needed to be built on a more than 70 degree incline for almost 150 yards downhill.  To do this Luc felled about ten huge trees  down the hill and the rest of us maneuvered them into a line to create an obstacle for the cows. 

I still have no idea how a cow manages to get down that valley.  It was treacherous for us workers and I had the use of both my arms and legs to maneuver and I don't weigh 500 lbs.  Regardless, I saw the cow pies all over the place, so somehow they manage to do it.  After the natural barrier was complete Luc and Travis taught the rest of us how to build a jack leg fence.  We had to cut trees in the valley to use as posts and rails for the fence.  Posts had to be debarked and the rails cut to the right measurements before putting them together.  The jack legs basically look like giant X's and the long rails are then hammered into them, three on one side and one on the other to hold the jacks in place creating a fence.

The fence ran from the bottom of the natural barrier the along the valley floor.  It had to cross a stream as well which created some interesting problems that had to be dealt with.  We then build a swinging fence out of barb wire at the end of the jack leg.  The other side of the valley was not as steep but almost twice as long as the first.  We spent the rest of our time at Elkhorn constructing a barbed wire fence more than 200 yards up the other side of the valley.  This proved to be the most difficult part because the soil was very rocky.  We had to build two sets of H frame posts on which the the barbed wire was to be strung.  These posts had to be extremely sturdy which meant having to dig deep enough without the use of any power equipment and then tamping in the soil and rocks with a rock bar around the posts for hours.  It was definitely a workout.  My group did have a nice cabin to stay in after the work was done each day.  We also had access to the hot springs which were right down the road from the cabin.