Red Barn clean out.

Most of the beauty of the Ranch is natural. The setting. Mount Lassen. The Water. Battle Creek. The Tuscan Formation. It is a unique place.

Those things don’t go away (we hope!). Everything else is replaceable. You can always rebuild a house, a garage, a shed, a well, and so on.

The one thing that does not seem replaceable is the Red Barn. It is old. We aren’t sure exactly how old, but we think the boards came from the Blue Ridge Flume. That would mean the Red Barn was build in the 1880s.

It makes sense. The Ranch was settled at least as early as 1872. A barn would have been an early priority. The construction is old-school post and beam. Some of the beams are concave from livestock rubbing or chewing. There is no doubt it has some serious age on it.

But it was dirty and filled with junk. Lots of junk. Animal scat everywhere. It was the dumping ground for everything. I opened one box and a raccoon jump out at me. I opened the box the rest of the way, and another raccoon jumped out at me. It took five months for us to even feel safe cleaning out the Red Barn!

We rented a big green dumpster from the local waste company: 20 cubic yards, 7 days, $594. By the end of the week it was full. Rotten lumber, twisted and bent metal roof material, odds and ends of all sorts. In the green dumpster.

The tractor came in handy to put some of the heavy stuff in. After we organized the stuff worth saving, it was time to sweep two decades of dirt, dust, and animal shit out.

When it was all said and done, we ended up with a pretty nice — and clean — Red Barn. Lots of room for more tractors.

More on that later ….

— KLM