Anybody who leases, owns or hunts on a tract of land is liable to run into the challenge of coming up with place names.
If you see a big buck in a food plot, how do you tell someone where it was?
“Well, you take that first lane to the right, go left at the bottom of the hill, pass the first food plot and go on to the second one with the crabapple tree. That’s where I saw it.”
Or you could say, “I saw it in the Crabapple Stand.”
Problem solved, challenge met.
After a while, you come up with a list of interesting place names.
A taxidermist friend of mine has been keeping up with some of them, as hunters often identify their trophy by where they killed it. Here are some of the names he jotted down:
Nursery, Palace, Green Monster, Steel Monster, Black Stand, Cornflakes Stand, Treehouse Stand, Gingerbread, Green Patch, The Sanctuary, Memory Lane, The Graveyard, Candy Land and Dixie Blind.
It’s guaranteed that each of those names has a story behind it — sometimes simple, sometimes not.
When my son Andy bought his property in Gillsburg years ago, he started coming up with names just so we’d know where to go: Magnolia Stand, Tripod Stand, Creek Stand, Cow Oak.
Angelyn and I faced the same situation with the Outback. I’d start out trying to describe where I’d had my latest wildlife sighting. When it got too complicated, we decided to start coming up with names to simplify the process.
Among them:
• Indigo Lane, so called because I saw a big indigo snake there.
• Bunny Lane for the frequency of rabbit sightings.
• Horseshoe Lane, because it’s shaped like a horseshoe.
• Horseshoe Stand, because it’s at the end of Horseshoe Lane.
• Marshy Lane, because it stays wet and muddy much of the year.
• Pillbox Stand, because it has an old metal hunting blind that made me think of a pillbox.
• Pillbox Trail, because it leads to the Pillbox Stand.
• COVID Trail, because I was working on it when I came down with coronavirus last year.
• Grand Canyon due to the deep ditch that almost swallowed me on a four-wheeler.
• North and South Vietnam, a food plot split by a creek that is surrounded by big, vine-draped hardwoods, giving it a jungle look.
• East-West Trail since it slices east and west across the property.
• Wildflower Patch, because I planted wildflowers there.
And so on.
Naming places becomes a fun challenge after awhile.
I used to hunt with a club that had so many stands we simply numbered them. When you got ready to hunt, you’d pull a tag off a rack at the camp so nobody would disturb you.
Though the food plots were numbered, that club had lots of other place names, from the Charlie Woods to the Babe Griffin Place to Sansing Road, which we pronounced Sing-Sing.
Bridge over troubled water
Anyone who fools with a large tract of land also is likely to face the dilemma of creek, ditch or mud-hole crossings.
I’m fortunate not to have to cross any sure-nuff creeks. Those are likely to require a culvert, bridge or some other structure.
Andy, for instance, had to get a welder to make a steel grid platform to lay across a deep ditch on his place. He made it just wide enough to accommodate a truck. In hindsight it should have been half again as wide just to soothe our nerves when we drive over it.
Even a steel bridge over a usually-dry ditch had to be wired to trees, because when the ditch floods, the water will float it off — hard to believe, but such is the power of water.
My crossings are shallower. I was riding on the Outback with a friend when he suggested a simple solution: sacks of cement. Just lay them down where you want to cross and they will soon solidify from the moisture, providing a solid bed to cross on.
Since then I’ve laid 40-pound sacks of Quikrete in several low places. And it usually takes more than I expect.
My latest endeavor was a big boggy stretch that stays wet all winter. I can ride my side-by-side across it as is, but every time I do, it gets worse. So I started buying Quikrete.
I lost count, but I’d say it took 20 to 30 bags to stretch from one side to the other. Some sank so deep I had to put a second layer on top.
It’s not perfect, but it was relatively cheap and low-tech.
Blazing trail with Light-Sabre
Another lesson I learned on the Outback came the hard way.
Much of the property is young pines choked with briars. Wanting to cut a few trails, I started out with a machete, then switched to a short-handled bush axe, which is more suited to the heavy work.
After that I graduated to a battery-powered hedge trimmer. With that, I can enter a thicket and slice through vines, briars and small branches like Luke Skywalker with a light-sabre.
I follow up with a weed-cutter outfitted with a blade to remove the saplings.
Which is exactly what I was doing when COVID symptoms hit — providing me with a memorable name for the path.
