How a campground gets built

First you decide where a campsite goes

Long before any lumber showed up, the work was walking the mountain with a can of marking paint and obsessing about where a deck should sit. Far enough off the road. Level enough to build on. Pointed at whatever there was to look at. Sixteen of these decisions, one at a time.

The leaves were still down, which made it easier to see what each site would actually face.

It started with a canopy, a generator and a stack of lumber

February on the mountain. A pop-up canopy, a miter saw, a generator, and enough pressure-treated lumber to figure out whether this was going to work at all.

No power up here yet, so everything ran off the generator. It got a lot of hours.

Everything came up the hill on a truck

Lumber, concrete piers, fuel, tools — every bit of it arrived a pickup load at a time and got carried the last stretch by hand. The piers are the heavy ones. Each deck sits on several.

An assembly line in the woods

Saw under the canopy, frames going together on the flat ground beside it, finished panels stacking up behind. On a good day the whole operation had a rhythm to it and the stack got noticeably taller.

Built flat, then carried up

Rather than haul a saw, a generator and a pile of lumber up to each site in turn, we built the decks as panels in one place — down at the work camp where the tools already were. Cut once, build the same thing sixty times, stack them. The pile grew through the winter.

Every deck on this mountain started as one of these.

Moving day

By July the stacks were tall and it was time to place them. A tracked skid steer carried each panel up the mountain one at a time, which is slower than it sounds and steeper than it looks.

Then the fiddly part: getting each one dead level. The sites are cleared and flat, but level is a different standard than flat, and every deck got shimmed until it was.

Supervision was constant

Every job site needs someone to sit in the middle of the work and look concerned about it.