She thinks my tractor's sexy

Today's post is about poky things.

One of the tasks we've been assigned is to clear the north half of the field the olive trees are in, so that Dad can plant another couple of hundred trees there. Chris and I are used to clearing brush for trail work, and Chris is a pro with a chain saw, so we thought it wouldn't be too hard.

Catclaw

Remember when I said everything in South Texas has thorns? Aside from cactus, the worst of the thorny plants down here is huisache (wee-satch). The previous locals, the Nahuatl, named it "thorn," and today's locals call it "catclaw." It's really a lovely plant. Sometimes, when it pokes you through three layers of clothing with its needle-sharp, inch long spines, the tips break off and the huisache leaves little pieces of itself inside your skin. Most people's skin reacts like it was scratched by a cat, and arms end up looking like angry battlefields.

Huisache is the main colonizer of the north half of the olive field, so for the last five days of work, we've been figuring out how best to avoid spending the time after work pulling tiny spines out of ourselves. We've cut so much of it now that there are about ten giant piles that will feel so good to burn. Revenge is a dish best served as a FIERY INFERNO.

Traffic on the morning commute

Speaking of revenge, today we also pulverized some prickly pear. For the northerners who've never had the misfortune to learn firsthand that prickly pear has two kinds of thorns, let me explain why I give prickly pear a wide berth. Although the most visible spines are big yellow ones, long and deadly looking, the worst ones are the ones you can't see. Because if you accidently bump into a prickly pear cactus, you spend about ten seconds pulling out the big spines and up to two weeks scratching at your skin, searching for the almost microscopic ones, thinking you got them all out only to find another one two days later.

gleefully massacring cactus

So today we uprooted some cactus with the tractor, pulverized some of it, and piled the rest of it up with plans to put a burn pile on top of it and burn it to the ground in the next couple weeks. I had daydreams about doing this to cactus as a kid.

PCT news:

Chris bought a Ti Tri Caldera Cone. It's basically something we can put under our pot to either block the wind when using an alcohol stove, or as a wood stove. We were concerned that alcohol wouldn't have enough power for two people, and other thru-hiking couples said wood stoves were a good option. I'm excited to try it out!

Turns out my sunglasses are a good filter.