One More scary moment;
This one happened just last winter. I had been felling some nice Ash trees down in the river bottom below our house. We are again heating totally with wood and I was stocking up. It's always muddy there in the winter and had been raining off and on for a couple of days. The place where I had been cutting was right below our house which is 100 feet above the stream.
The cut Ash chunks were on some high ground that had an old channel around either side and the old channels were very muddy. I knew that the water was going to be rising a lot that night and the next day because of upstream rains. I just wanted to salvage my hard earned firewood before it got washed all the way to Mexico. I wallowed my Kubota
L4200 across the old muddy channels and onto the elevated ground where the wood was cut and waiting. I have extensions on my FEL so I can carry near to a face cord of wood. After loading up I managed to get turned around and headed back across the muddy old channel. I made it about half way before sinking down to the frame, 4WD and all.
After trying to work back and forth for a while and just managing to make a giant mud hole I finally dumped the wood. I began to draw up a little thinking about the coming flood and possibly having to leave my nice tractor there!
Even with the wood dumped I was still stuck. Fortunately I had the backhoe mounted, even though the bucket was temporarily replaced with a wood splitter. I carry a heavy chain on the bucket at all times (my tractor looks like a tinker's wagon) so attached one end to the backhoe boom and the other to a tree. Using a combination of the backhoe and articulating the FEL to push too I finally was at least back onto the little island of higher mud.
I found another crossing that I hadn't wallowed out and put the tractor in 2nd or 3rd gear and with one last prayer tore across with mud flying everywhere from the four spinning tires. I made it and my stomach went back to normal size from the tennis ball it had been!:
I pulled on down next to where I had dumped the wood and loaded it up for the second time. It was cold, grey and coming a light rain. The slowly rising Middle Fork was gushing and gurgling right next to me about 20 feet away. I wallowed the loaded tractor back a couple of hundred yards to the foot of our ridge, leaving deep muddy furrows all the way. Going back up the winding trail through Cedar Hollow was a breeze. The next morning you could hear the river roaring against the trees now that it was out of it's bank. It was six or seven feet over where I had been working. I sure hate those situations, but if you live in the country and do much, sooner or later they will raise their head!
Frank
The flooding river this summer got up 12-15 feet over the bottom.
My deer stand below the house is lashed to a big Gum. That driftwood is 12feet above grade.
