On Friday, May 16, the Arizona Elk Society and volunteers met at Leonard Canyon for our first habitat project of the season. We started on this project last October, but our 2nd weekend was snowed out. During that weekend we had gone in and set all of the posts. When we arrived at camp around 10:30, most of the volunteers had showed up already, so we immediately started setting up camp. It was a beautiful cool day with temps in the 60’s. After taking about an hour to set up camp, we loaded up the trailer and headed down to the jobsite. Our goal was to get all of the panels staged where they needed to be for the next day. We were successful in achieving this, so we decided to start hanging the panels and the gate. We had a crew this weekend that was very good, and by the end of the night, we had panels hung on 7 or the 8 sides of the fence! We decided to head back to camp for some burgers and leave the rest for Saturday. Afterwards, we all sat around a campfire chatting for a bit. Saturday morning, we woke up to breakfast burritos, and a crisp morning. After eating and our brief safety meeting, we headed back to the jobsite, which was about 1.5 miles from camp. We broke up into several teams. We had a team that was hanging the final panels, a team that was starting to place the top and bottom rails on the fence, and a cutting team. Work went fast and we had most of the top rails attached by lunch time, so we headed to camp for some hotdogs and brats. After lunch, we continued working on the single rails, and now had 2 teams working on them. With a great crew with lots of experience building continuous rail fences, we had the project completely finished by 4:30 Saturday. We cleaned up the jobsite, loaded up the trailer, and headed back to camp. When we arrived at camp, we realized the wind had gotten up pretty good and had moved our kitchen canopy. So we put it back up, secured it to trees, and cooked an alfredo/marinara pasta supper. Afterwards, it was quite windy, so we did not have a fire. We just all retired to bed. Sunday morning, after a very windy night with probably 40 mph gusts, we got up to again find our kitchen canopy had been knocked over, along with the grills. So we took it down, cooked a little breakfast, loaded up the trailer, and called this job completed. Overall, we had a great crew that worked hard to build this 570 linear foot fence. If you may be interested in working on one of our habitat projects, please contact russj@arizonaelksociety.org. (fb)

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