Post by Sabre52 on Mar 13, 2018 19:56:01 GMT -5
Howdy folks,
Needed a break this week so yesterday the wife unit and I drove down to George west to hnut petrified wood. Four hours each way but super light traffic, since he oil fields pretty much closed down and the countryside was green and full of wildflowers and blooming shrubs of all sorts.
Unfortunately, the wood hunt part of the trip was not spectacular like it used to be. Live Oak county is continuing with their destruction of all our wood hunting roads by covering them with a thick layer of caliche. This effective buried most all the wood in the bar ditches with a thick layer of white crap. Only gravel exposed is a little in places that have eroded due to rainfall. IN past trips we might of hit one e section where we filled a five gallon bucket in half an hour. This trip we covered at least a dozen or more roads and only found maybe 40 pounds of good wood in seven hours of hiking the roadsides. Most that probably came from a mile or so of eroded sections on various roads. In addition, if one can tell from all the chipping, these roads have been hit hard by collectors recently too. About 1/3 collected by us was tumble stuff, 1/3 cabbing stuff and 1/3 weird hunks for the wife's gardens.
Here are just a couple of pics to show what our wood collecting paradise has become and the caliche trucks even added the insult of working on one of my favorite roads right while we were there. These road used to be surfaced with wood bearing gravel and the ditches would be full of wood. I would recommend any future visitors try to time their hunts for right after a major storm, That way, maybe some of the road cover would be washed away and the ditches cleaned out to reveal new wood.
I'll post some pics of some of the better wood we got later.....Mel
Needed a break this week so yesterday the wife unit and I drove down to George west to hnut petrified wood. Four hours each way but super light traffic, since he oil fields pretty much closed down and the countryside was green and full of wildflowers and blooming shrubs of all sorts.
Unfortunately, the wood hunt part of the trip was not spectacular like it used to be. Live Oak county is continuing with their destruction of all our wood hunting roads by covering them with a thick layer of caliche. This effective buried most all the wood in the bar ditches with a thick layer of white crap. Only gravel exposed is a little in places that have eroded due to rainfall. IN past trips we might of hit one e section where we filled a five gallon bucket in half an hour. This trip we covered at least a dozen or more roads and only found maybe 40 pounds of good wood in seven hours of hiking the roadsides. Most that probably came from a mile or so of eroded sections on various roads. In addition, if one can tell from all the chipping, these roads have been hit hard by collectors recently too. About 1/3 collected by us was tumble stuff, 1/3 cabbing stuff and 1/3 weird hunks for the wife's gardens.
Here are just a couple of pics to show what our wood collecting paradise has become and the caliche trucks even added the insult of working on one of my favorite roads right while we were there. These road used to be surfaced with wood bearing gravel and the ditches would be full of wood. I would recommend any future visitors try to time their hunts for right after a major storm, That way, maybe some of the road cover would be washed away and the ditches cleaned out to reveal new wood.
I'll post some pics of some of the better wood we got later.....Mel