September 16th.

A Saturday morning.  Hot languid August is sobering up after summer's careless dissolution and pure laziness (boy, was she ever stingy with tomatoes this year!), and I am realizing that it's the middle of September! 

Oh my gosh!  I think that was a shiver running down my spine...Off with the green dress of Summer and on with the yellow and brown cloak!  Personally, I hope she goofs off a little more.  She came late to the party and ought to be the last to leave.  I say phooey on sober Autumn and let's all celebrate and encourage a fickle pretentious Summer (easy to say if you've got a large pile of firewood).  And there is nothing like a tinder-dry, leaf-crackly hunting season to hone the skills of the hunter who can always use more patience.  Be patient, Summer.

I am digging and building wall as fast as I can.  Most of the dirt was removed this winter, but it still takes 30 buckets of dirt out to prep for the next wall section.  This work will be impossible once the rainy season comes as the water soaks the talc. 

In the past 12 days we have extended the concrete wall we are building down another two feet, making six feet in all, plus another step on the North wall.  We have also built a two-foot high secvtion of wall on the West side.  This wall completes the concrete work done last winter under a hanging rock and brings that earlier wall down to where it sits on immoveables and is joined to two steps cemented to the same.

Last night I worked until dark, prepping these steps for cement work this afternoon when Charlie is available.  I surely am thankful for Charlie.  He has been the best helper I've had.  He has been my sole surface support and second man on the dig for the last year.

Last year at this time we had not even begun installing the upper half of the culvert.  I was still building its rock foundation at the 30 foot level.  Now we are just two feet from the top with backfilling.  Electrical conduit with 110V, 12V, and 2 camera lines are installed with lights.  We have the capability of recording everything digitally onto a laptop.  Now we are ust a dozen or so digs short of having everything shored up down to almost 80 feet deep.  One thousand buckets out this year.  That's 200 climbs up the shaft for me and almost three miles of lifting buckets for Charlie. 

We got a real treat last Sunday when a young fellow James from the Cascade Grotto (he was down helping Hester Mallone with some cave restoration she is doing fo the Park Service) gave us a helping hand.  Boy, was it ever nice to have young blood escorting buckets up and down the shaft while these two old boys do our work.  I ust built wall, didn't have to climb for buckets.  Those buckets go up nicely, but not down without help. 

A construction note:  The East wall, five feet down from the present cedar shoring--that is, five feet below the ledge--is cemented to and around a quite large boulder that was behind the muds.  There was air space behind it against the South wall and the mud looked to be what was washed in there during the Veteran's Day slump, three years back.  This boulder seemed not to have moved during the slumping but had muds flow past it.  Seems though, like I said, the same thing about some other rocks ten feet below that I have yet to deal finally with!  You know, maybe the big jam-up at the pinch point...