Garden Valley - A Quick Tour

We have loved exploring our land, and I feel like there is still so much more exploring to do. Here's a quick "tour" of our land. We have started calling it "Beaver Creek" so we don't just say "land" or "Garden Valley". We thought Beaver Creek was fitting because of all the trees the beaver has felled across the creek.

This is a picture of the front of our land. Our land is narrow and long. This is the flat part where we will build a cabin one day. For now, Matt has weed-whacked down all the weeds and we are using this as a camp space.

When we bought the property, we thought there was some kind of drainage problem, because the left hand side of the property at the top here was super wet and marsh-like. Matt started moving weeds around a bit and saw water bubbling up. What a fun surprise to find that we have a natural spring on our land! We have started to channel it a bit to try and dry things out on that side of the property. We are happy that we don't have to deal with a drainage issue, and that the water keeps our big, beautiful willow (and some cattails!) alive since we don't have a sprinkler system up there yet.

There is a bit of a drop off at the end of this flat section that goes down to the creek. We have an "upper creek" (that is really just irrigation water - you can see Matt standing by it below), and then another drop to the "lower creek" where we have already spent hours and hours playing in the water. The water in the lower creek is pretty low right now since it's the end of summer, but we were told it was super high this spring after all the water last winter. It will be interesting to see the water level change throughout the year.

There's a trail that runs along the creek. It cuts through our property and is maintained by the HOA. Yes, this means that technically people can walk through our property, but we don't mind. We only have only seen one other neighbor down there, and that also means we can walk along the trail along through our neighbors' land (we only have two other neighbors with cabins right now - the rest is undeveloped). The path is the perfect place for a stroll... and if you watch closely you might see some elk or wild turkeys! Hopefully we don't ever see any bears that we know are out and about too...

Just past the creek is our "jungle" area, with lots of viney plants (in the picture below, I cleared a small trail through the plants).

Past that, it opens to the "forest" with tall pine trees. This picture was taken close to the back of our property looking up toward the front.