VE Berg Trip 2

Thanks for those pics.

I've encouraged all members of the group to give their own little input of the trip. That way we'll have some nice, varied coverage.

In total we cut down 223 pines and ring-barked 12. The pines we cut down are typically 30cm-4m tall. The "babies" (saplings) you can sometimes pull out by hand, and the next size up with one swing of a bush knife. Thereafter you get the ones that cut easily with a bow saw, what we call the "juvees" (juveniles). The one in the pic above is a good example. These are the most fun because they give the most satisfaction and fall over nicely. Many juvees at a time tend to make your arms totally pumped out though. Then you get bigger juvees which can still be cut down, but tend to need two people to saw, and you need to push them a lot to open the sawing gap and get them to fall over. These are still fun but very hard work. Ring-barking tends to be the hardest...you have to saw off branches first, then the chopping begins, and its tedious and bruises your hands and arms.

We also cut down one Wattle tree in addition because it was small enough to cut right down. We left a bigger one standing because it wouldn't have been effective through mechanical means.

This was all just in the Tseketskeke Valley. And we only just made a sizeable dent...we have to go back possibly 2-3 times to get everything out. We came across two big clusters with female trees...one beyond the Blue Pools, and the other after the hut going up the pass. These we've only just started. At least we took care of the female tree that is causing the upper cluster.

So to summarise what we did, first day was walking up the Tseke river bed from the Blue Pools to the hut. We took out a lot of trees on that day. Second day the guys went up Tseke Pass while the ladies had a girl's day at the hut. We took out a good number of pines again, but had to to stop ourselves from continuing in favour of going up the pass. When we came back down we worked on the hut. On the third day we took care of two trees and did some minor clearing of the path leading from the hut to the Camel (this we got special permission for and it should only be done within the context of a trip like this). When we return to the area we will try clear more of the contour path bit by bit. tonymarshall has posted a nice write-up with pics of our trip up Tseke Pass in this thread .