Recently the local bulldozer driver, Allan Muff was coming up the gorge to do some work so I jumped at the chance to get him to do some work for us. Before he even arrived he did a lot of work on the road so that he could get his transporter up. This has made a huge difference when traveling in and out. His first job up here was to put a track in on the face opposite the house up to the top of the ridge. Allan has been driving bulldozers for years and has a very good eye for getting the right angles to put a track in. now this face opposite the house that used to take thirty minutes of hard slog to get to the top of can be easily be concurred on the four wheeler in about two minutes.
The four wheel drive track that goes from our road gate to the top of the hill is 2.4 km long which Allan had put in many years ago was in need of some maintenance so this was quickly cleaned up. I wanted to put in a couple of fence lines so the bulldozers was going to make this job a lot easier. When I fenced the pig block had I done this all by hand and it was real hard work fencing over the uneven ground, so by clearing these fence lines would make the fencing work a lot easier.
In the past I have done a bit of work on a digger but I have not had anything to do with a bulldozers so I did not know how steep they could go. I was blown away watching Allan coming down one fence line as I took some photos of him from the opposite face. The hill got that steep it was almost vertical. For a start Allan was pushing material in front of himself then backing up a bit to get more material to push down. Finally he got to the stage where he just could not back up so he just went straight to the bottom.
Once in the creek I thought he was wedged in as his blade was against the opposite bank. As I mentioned Allan has been doing this job for years and really knows his stuff so while I thought he was stuck he just slowly wriggled his bulldozer around so that it was facing up the creek then he backed down the tight gully dropping over some of the six foot drop offs until he got down to the four wheel drive track then he rattled on back up the hill to carry on.
Once he had finished all of the fence lines and tracks he went down below the hut and moved a whole lot of soil around so that we now have a big flat area in front of the yards.
