Happy 2015 & A New Bridge (Out of junk, of course!)

Happy 2015 everyone! We are so excited about this next year and hope you are too. We celebrated our best holiday season yet, hiked many miles, enjoyed many great meals, hung out with both our families & dear friends and accomplished quite a number of goals too. We feel quite satisfied and grateful for this life we live!

Most of our property is old field habitat, but we do have one very small section of woods. We've hankered to put a trail in this section since we moved here and we finally did it! A small stream runs through this area and we needed a way to cross it so we built a bridge from reclaimed materials. The idea was all Steve's, really. He's brilliant, I say!

Now for Steve's explanation of the process:

We had an old section of antenna tower laying around for quite some time and it turned out to be just the right length to span the creek. Being triangular, it had strength to span the creek, support some decking and convey people across it. The only downside to triangular is that we couldn't simply lay it on the ground and put the decking on (we could have done that with a square cross section). A trip back to a stockpile of reclaimed wood and a bit of head-scratching yielded the below solution: sink the narrow part of the triangle into the soil until the wide part of the triangle came to rest on a piece of 4x6. A couple of strategic shims under the ends of the 4x6 and the fastener-free span was ready for decking!

Jennifer's dad gets these great heavy duty pallets for us and they have a million uses. You will get the idea from the below pics that we were able to use parts of two pallets to make 2 sections of decking. 

Like the parable of the fishes and the loaves, scavenging projects always yield scraps and crumbs of materials that make the whole larger than the sum of the parts:

Below we place the decking section on (they are heavy enough in weight that we don't need to fasten them down), make final adjustments and test it out:

Just in time for a bunch of recent rain and a creek that's "up":

A note from Steve: I attribute any "brilliance" to frugality and ingenuity gleaned from our parents. Jennifer and I both get a great deal of satisfaction from making something useful from salvaged items - which is handy, given that we don't play the lottery!