This morning the weather was unexpectedly fine, so Debbie and I set out to burn said brush piles. We set up a water line, armed ourselves with matches and paper to start a blaze, a pitchfork, and drove the tractor out to a spot near the southeast corner of our property. This spot is on the peninsula formed by a bend in the irrigation canal, and it's a long way from any structures or trees – a perfect spot for a burn. It was also conveniently close to about half the brush piles left behind by the Mormon horde. We put a bit of brush on the spot and in short order we had a nice blaze going (photo above). The fire was so hot that I couldn't get closer than about six feet to the brush pile, unless I was willing to have my beard burned off (which I was not).
We worked as hard as two ancient and decrepit people could, for about 5 hours, until we could plausibly say that rain was threatening us. At that point we sat down and didn't get up for about an hour, while pretending to watch the fire closely. Since everything for about 100 miles in every direction had just been soaked with almost 2 inches of rain, in reality there was no fire danger at all. But our burn permit required us to remain in attendance, so we had our excuse :)
As I write this, I'm about to stagger off to my bed to rest my weary bones. With any luck at all, tomorrow morning we'll get up and do it all over again.
Oh, and we burned about one fifth of the brush. We have quite a bit more work to do! And we are also learning in a very direct way just how much that Mormon horde accomplished on a rainy Saturday morning...
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