4/12-14/16 I went up to Camp Serendipity for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

Before I left, I went to our vet and picked up the stray cat we had caught and brought in for neutering and shots. Then I drove to Dave and Janet's office and delivered the cat to Janet so she could take it to the rescue shelter where she volunteers. Then I turned around and headed for the mountains.

Next I stopped at the Post Office and then proceeded on to Brooks Biddle where I picked up the registration and license plates for the truck I had bought from them. Then, after a beautiful drive over the pass, I stopped at the rest area so I could text Ellen about the cat before I drove out of cell phone range.

I arrived at Camp Serendipity at 12:15. The first thing I did was to check on the rhubarb I had transplanted last fall. The snow was finally melted away from it and it had two nice leaves out and it looked eager to sprout more and get growing. It will be nice to have a supply of rhubarb up there.

After bringing up my gear, hoisting the flag, and building a fire in the stove, I had my lunch and my usual nap. Then I went out on the porch and placed all the stoop pieces into their final positions. Gravity holds it in place nicely so I won't need to fasten it down until later. I want to wait until I decide what to do about guard and hand rails before I fasten the logs and slabs down. I will probably have to drill through the step and the logs for the newel post and I may have to move them in order to do that. So I will wait. Eventually I will spike the parts down with rebar dowels and those are hard, if not impossible, to take out once they are driven in.

Next I went into the woods and checked on all the giant sequoias. I connected up the hoses for the irrigation system for Brian and gave Brian an hour or two worth of watering. The trees all looked good except that the injury I gave John looks like it might have been bad. I don't think I cut into the cambium layer but I really can't tell. I'll keep an eye on it but I'm not sure what I can do about it.

On Wednesday, I picked up a bunch of small firewood from where I had cut it up on the drainfield and stacked it under the eaves at the cabin. Then I built a fire in the stove before I made my breakfast.

After breakfast I went to work on the back staircase. I started by making the vertical gauge board. It is an 8-foot 1x2 with a 16d nail driven partway into the board so that the head sticks out perpendicularly a couple inches. The nail is located exactly the same distance from the end of the board as the vertical distance from the top of the gauge rail to the surface of the tread I will install. I had prepared a spreadsheet with all those distances calculated and listed. As more treads are installed, the nail is moved accordingly on the gauge board. The protruding nail hangs over the gauge rail in order to locate the correct height of the tread surface.

Next, I used a tape and the spreadsheet I had prepared and marked both gauge rails for the horizontal position of each tread nose. There will be 10 treads, so there were 10 marks on each rail. Then I used a crosscut hand saw to cut small notches on the inside top edge of the rails at each of the marks. The notches will receive the plumb bob strings and keep them in place. I shot some video of that activity, but they didn't turn out and I probably will not use them.

After lunch and a nap, I went looking for a tread blank to use for the first tread I planned to install. I rejected four slabs from on and under the front porch. Then I went to the woodshed to get one from there. There were 13 slabs stored there and I only need 10 for the staircase so I was relieved to find that I had plenty of them. I dragged one over to the cabin to use.

Next, I removed the bottom two temporary plank treads from the staircase. I was surprised to discover that instead of using lag screws to fasten them, I had used 8 3-inch wood screws on each end instead. That means that I will have to buy a supply of lag screws in order to install the slab treads. On each end, there were two screws holding the tread to the gusset, and six screws holding the gusset to the log stringer. It took a while to back out all 32 screws since some of the Phillips heads were packed with dirt and had to be cleaned out first.

Next, I moved a temporary 4x4 that was lag screwed to the log newel post and was being used as an anchor for the temporary rope rail. It had been screwed to the inside of the post and would be in the way of the tread installation if it weren't moved. So I moved it 90° around the post to get it out of the way. Then I hooked the rope rail back up again.

On Thursday morning I planed the curved part of the tread blank and used a scraper to sort of clean up the flat surface. Then I screwed on the 1/4" plywood pieces to the ends of the tread blank for use in suspending the blank for scribing.

When I put the blank on the stringers getting ready to position it, I discovered that the stanchion I had made to hold the outer gauge rail was too close in and would have to be moved. That was a disappointment, but after looking at it, it will not be much of a problem to move it and then re-align the rail. I stopped at that point and will move the stanchion next week. Before I left for home at 12:30 I had another look at the rhubarb and was pleased to see that it had grown another couple small leaves and the buds were getting swollen and ready to burst open. It will be fun to see how much it grows before I get back next week.