-Russ Johnson
On Friday, July 25 the Arizona Elk Society resumed our habitat project season. We were at Apache Maid where we are building a 1.8 mile log worm fence to protect the tanks from severe damage that has occurred from off highway vehicles and to block off a user created road across the meadow. We arrived around 10 AM and immediately started to set up camp. This took us a couple of hours to complete, and then loaded our tools and headed over to the meadow project site to start construction. We worked for about 5 hours and had finished almost ¼ mile of fence by the time we were done. We then retired to camp for some burgers and chips for supper, and sat around camp chatting with each other.
Saturday morning, we woke up to breakfast burritos and hot coffee. After a brief safety meeting, we loaded up the trailers and headed back out to the project site. Friday, we had 7 volunteers, but on Saturday we had right at 20. The forest service also had a fire crew that was staging logs for the other phases of our project and doing some other things for us. We worked hard and had a solid system going. When we build log worm fences, we break up into teams. We have a staging/layout team, a pre-drilling team, an assembly team, someone running a charging station, and a few floaters. With this system, by the time that lunch rolled around, we had finished another 4/10 of a mile of fence. With this certain meadow, the forest service asked us to do something a little different because of a population of antelope that use the meadow. We were asked to put in antelope crossings every ¼ mile. We did this simply by removing the bottom log of the fence at those areas. After eating brats and hotdogs for lunch, we went back out and worked another 4.5 hours. By the end of the day, we had another .2 miles of fence built. Then we headed back to the campsite for some pulled pork, corn on the cob, and baked beans for supper. We again had great conversations, and saw a herd of elk run through just beside camp.
Sunday morning, we woke up to a little cooler temp and had pancakes/sausage/eggs. Not everyone stayed for Sunday, but we wanted to work at least a couple of hours. After breakfast, we tore down camp and headed out one last time for the weekend to the project site. In our 2 hours, we built another .2 miles of fence. All total for the weekend, we are able to build 1 mile of fence, which is great because we were only expecting to get roughly .6 miles completed. We had lots of new volunteers to habitat projects this weekend, and each worked extremely hard. We have 2 more weekends scheduled at this project, but depending on how much we get done next weekend, we may not need those.
If you are interested in helping out on any of our habitat projects, please email me
