… Well, several dozers later, we made it 540 feet in and tied our selves into the old cart road.  We tried larger machines, smaller machines, a backhoe, a farm tractor etc.. The bigger the machine the bigger the mess.  The smaller machine, the more emasculated we were.  It was a no win, but highly entertaining.

The most interesting of our machines was a dozer with a clam bucket on the front and a backhoe on the back.  With that machine you really could get into trouble.  The front could dig down to scoop some earth, and the backhoe could dig down in the rear end of the machine and within an hour or so you could be 3 feet down and completely stuck.   My father-in-law visited this worksite a few times, as did others, all wanting to play with these adult Tonka Toys.

The day that the clam-bucket dozer was there, Bob the father-in-law made a visit.  He was a greater boston, college educated, business engineering guy, who couldn’t wait to retire to his family land in Rindge and play.  Alstead wasn’t far from Rindge.  The machine was moved off the truck, driven in about 250 feet and parked next to its first project.   Bob had determined he was going to dig or push out the mud at the project site, fill it with rocks.  We discussed it, paced it out , looked at where the water would go.  Great have fun.

I went on to cut a few more trees down, flag the road wider here and there, then realized I no longer heard the dozer.  That really is never a good sign.  So down the trail I go, coming around the corner, there is the top half of the machine, the rest was gone.  If that had been in the age of you tube and smartphones, it would have had a lot of views ..  he was laughing, I was laughing,(although a little concerned in the back of my head, track replacement is bit expensive.), 2 other weren’t sure if laughing was appropriate.  That dozer blade built a wall in front of him and the mud wouldn’t quit behind him, so the more he dug, the worse it became, or maybe the funnier it became.   This is where you begin to realize that renting the right machine, with a professional operator might be the right thing to do.  We began a serious pivoting operation, then a pulling operation and dug ourselves to freedom and it was only Friday, we still had 2 more days.