Build Trip!

In early October, I headed back to Indiana to hopefully build the platform. There were still a few design decisions to be made, but I had a pretty good idea of what the end product would be. I was hoping that the weather would cooperate and that nobody would get hurt.



My Dad and I got started setting up a base camp near the tree. Luckily it was possible to drive within 15' of the tree, which made it easy to haul supplies to the site. We cleared out some of the underbrush near the tree so that we'd have a nice clean work area.



We set up about 18' of scaffolding along one side of the tree. We roped it off to one of the trunks so that there wasn't much chance of it tipping over. At first it seemed impossibly high near the top of the scaffolding, but after a few trips up and down I started to get use to it.


All 300 pounds of hardware showed up successfully. Making sure everything was there by the time I showed up required more planning than I expected. I was really nervous that I'd show up and some critical shipment wouldn't be there, and I'd lose a few days waiting for it. I was happy to see that all the heavy packages had made it OK.