I Spy from the Sky a Slice of Pie

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Maybe even more.

This is our little acreage and our house with the slate-colored roof.  Tony's place is to the left and down with the red roof, and Tim's place is to the right and up, while Chuck's is across the road from us (his house is off frame.)  The smaller building with the darker, rust-red roof is our barn.  The line from the top right parallel to the right side of the pic is our east property line.  The trees at a 90 degree angle to the road to the right of Tony's house is our west property line.  If you put a straight edge on these two lines, they meet to form our southern (pointed) property end.  

The dark green trees are mostly doug firs, although we have maples in the mix.  To the left of our house are those big shade trees that are often in the frame when I take pictures of the gardens.  The apple green is all blackberries.  The darker lines in the blackberries are the paths we've cut through. 

That bright, not quite white area south of the house is the firepit patio.  The new goat pasture goes downhill past the firepit to the meadow (a subtle clearing with a round patch of trees) and runs east back to the property edge.  A lot of the original goat pasture is brownish--summer grass, not dust.  The only dusty (and muddy during the rains) area is the cream-colored line edging the barn.  In our driveway (which has a jog that runs off toward the barn) you can see a small, pale blue object--the Nova--and a darker object off to the side that's the Bruiser.  

The yellow areas are where the boy mowed and also areas I keep trimmed around the veggie garden.  In closer shots you can see the grape arbor, although it's not covered over this time of year, and the rosemary, but from this distance the only detail you can make out reliably are a line of trees--western redcedar--that protect us from the road a bit.  I planted timber bamboo west of them, but it'll be a while before that will be dense enough to cast a good shadow.  At the moment the only thing to distinguish it from the almost-identically-colored pasture grass is the darker (because it wasn't mowed) grass.

In summer the hike to the barn is not very far.  In winter, with the wind blowing like crazy from the east slogging through snow or skating on ice, it's at least a hundred miles each way.  

The dogs have a large area to play in (the green area between the house and the road,) but apparently that's insufficient because when they get out they all dash down into the ravine (where all the big trees are) and are gone for hours.  We're on a very steep slope, and even on four legs it's very dangerous down in that ravine which plunges into cliffs in hidden places, so we try not to let them escape and when they do I worry like crazy that they won't make it back.  Rumor has it that a herd of pigs were lost in the ravine.  That's where most of the cougar, coyote and bear reside.  Especially folks that have lived exclusively in urban areas would be shocked how quickly--in a few hundred feet--the territory around here changes from pastoral development to very wild with areas that are impassable to humans and sometimes impassable even to the animals that live there.

This is our little bit of the world.  It's fun to look at it from high in the sky.