As I've noted before (Construction Zone, Mailboxes, Good Fences), Kevin and I are do-it-yourselfers. As I've also noted (Stonehaven), we have a lot of rocks. Every winter, the earth expels more. Some time ago, I got the idea of laying rocks across a particularly mucky area to make it easier to cross in our Ranger.

Some background: We have a leaky pond, so the area below it tends to have really thick, deep mud after we've had a lot of rain. Last fall, I studied the area and finally chose a path across. Of course, it turned out to be the wrong path, and I got stuck. Kevin pulled me out with the tractor.

That was when I had the idea of placing rocks across the ditch to provide a bridge (more like stepping stones for tires). We've driven across that area quite a bit with the tractor and Ranger this spring, and had some decent tire tracks to provide a guide to where we could put rocks, but I hadn't had time to lay the rocks.

This past weekend, it looked as if our time would be taken up with reconstructing our corral west of the holding pens we had built. But then we realized that we needed to clean up the piles of dirt and stone left from holding-pen construction before putting the corral panels back up.  While my husband changed the equipment hooked to the tractor, I dug thistles. He wasn't back, yet, when I finished digging, so I got the brilliant idea of getting started on my bridge.

There are rocks laying all over the place right next to the mucky area, so I began picking up the flat rocks and placing them in the water-filled tracks. The tracks were rather deep, so in some places, I had to stack rocks, so I could continue building out my bridge. Surprisingly, I managed to maintain my balance, although a couple of times my foot slipped into the mud a bit.

Meanwhile, Kevin had returned with the tractor. He scooped up a large pile of dirt in the loader and brought it down the hill to place in the drainage ditch at the other side of the pond, then returned up the hill. I heard some loud bangs, but didn't think much about them until he came back down the hill and dumped a large load of rocks he'd piled in the loader next to my meager bridge. Show off! He returned for a couple more loads, then ran over his rocky bridge with the tractor a few times to try to mash the rocks down into the mud.

Neither of our bridges would pass a civil engineering inspection, but we think they'll do the job we need them to do—get us across the mucky places without getting stuck. And we cleared a few rocks to boot!