I hate mud. Oh, how I hate mud…

Okay, so here’s the situation…

Torso Boy, like any old man*, is a creature of habit. He has designated one spot in the whole world in which a Corgi may take a dump, and he abides by that decision with grim consistency. He simply refuses to shit anywhere else. Normally that’s just fine; it’s a good logical spot, convenient but out of the way and near the ashpit which makes cleanup easy.

Problem is, this has been a wet winter so far. It has been a consistently muddy winter, and that one spot…

…is just the worst for mud. (more below the fold, because there are quite a few photos)

It’s in an ash field – I used to think caliche clay made the worst mud but that was when I was naive and inexperienced and now I can say with confidence that the worst mud is wet volcanic ash. And this one is at the foot of a north-facing slope which holds the snow – so instead of just melting and dumping its water all at once and getting it over with, it might dribble out moisture onto that ash field for weeks. Every time you struggle back from briefly walking your dog you have to stop on the porch to take off your boots (Oh how I love that porch) and then spend 8-15 minutes – I timed it – to clean off the thick gooey mud. Normally it lasts for a couple of days and gets over it but this has been going on since November and by now I hate mud with sufficiently incandescent passion to do something I didn’t really believe I’d ever get around to doing…

I went up to the plateau where there’s a bunch of busted shale lying on the surface…

…and I picked up as many chunks as I thought the Jeep could safely go downhill with – which turned out to be about exactly half as much as I need…

And I laid them out like stepping stones on the worst patches of our walky path, as far as the stones lasted…

…and then I went out to the wash and brought back sand…

…and as I said I only got about half the needed work done because that last part hurt my still-healing back again and it was definitely time to stop. Plus I’m getting a little old used-up for this sort of heavy lifting and I was really tired and had other chores that needed doing, so I called a halt. But the worst parts of the trail at least have stepping stones and sand, and we’ll see if that helps the bringing the mud home problem at all.

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*Okay, he’s only pushing nine, which isn’t very old. But he is strong in his opinion of how certain things are supposed to work. Unless Dharma comes around, at which point he just completely loses his tiny mind but that’s another story.