5/23-25/06 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

It rained all the way over the mountains. I arrived at 1:00 and it stopped raining shortly thereafter. After moving in and having lunch, I bucked up all but one of the remaining old logs down at the log pile. They were pretty soaking wet and full of carpenter ant colonies. I started a fire and tried to burn the logs but it was hard to get them going. As they warmed up, the ants crawled out and tried to get away. It was kind of ugly. I got some of the logs to burn before I quit for the day. It started raining again after dinner.

On Wednesday things were wet after the rain during the night but I lit the fire again anyway. I used a lot of dry wood from under the porch trying to get the wet log sections to burn. It sort of worked. There were lots of ants crawling around the burn area.

In between sessions with the fire, I selected rocks for the fourth step and I mortared in the first two steps. In the middle of placing the mortar, it started raining. Since the steps I was working on were directly under the drip line of the roof, I had to hurry up and rig a tarp up over my work to keep the mortar from washing away. That made the work a lot more awkward but I was happy with the result.

One thing the rain had revealed to me was that the third step held a pool of water. One of the rocks was concave on top and held a puddle about ten inches in diameter. I realized that I couldn't leave it that way because if that puddle froze in the winter, my steps would be very dangerous. I decided to fill the concavity with mortar, which I did. It slopes a little so the water drains off completely.

During the work, I fed one gray jay and one chipmunk from time to time.

On Thursday morning, I cleaned up the steps, put away the tools and then did quite a bit of thinking about how I might build a spiral staircase. I also inspected a couple trees I might fall next week. I left for home at 1:20.