Building Bridges

I've been wanting to build a bridge over a muddy stream crossing near my house for ages. I had for the most part stopped using a particular little trail on my land behind my house because of it. I had planned to build the bridge last fall and just wasn't able to do it. And by December figured we would not get another chance until spring. But, as luck would have it, we had a warm up and some rain that melted off most of the snow. So, we jumped on the opportunity to get the bridge done. On Friday, Cierra and I cut the decking boards and lugged them into the woods to the stream. It was an interesting chore dragging the boards through the woods on a winding and bumpy trail but we managed it in 3 trips. Saturday morning, I went to Home Depot to get PT posts for the supports and decking screws. Pam and Cierra met me at the house and we lugged the post and tools we needed down into the woods. It took us a while to get the supports laid down fairly level. We were able to pry enough fairly large rocks out of the frozen ground with a pry bar to get the job done. I was impressed with the size of some of the rocks Cierra pulled out and moved. Once the support beam were down we laid the decking boards on and I started screwing them down. At this point, Cierra and Pam headed down the trail to do some trail clean up and brush cutting. Fred came out and helped by finishing off screwing the boards down. 

So of course Cierra and I had to hop on Marie and Tink to try out our new bridge. Silly horses were NOT impressed with our efforts at all. As much as they had hated crossing through the mud, they were trying to do that to go around the scary new bridge. It took a bit of convincing but we were finally able to get the girls to cross the bridge.