Moving materials to site

After all our exertions filling bags with rock over the last few weeks, we were ready for the arrival of the helicopter to move them. Usually as soon as the helicopter is booked you can guarantee that it'll rain, the cloud will drop or the wind will really pick up or even a combination of these things. This time we were lucky, we were forecast a whole week of settled weather and there was hardly a cloud in the sky all week.

Our first helicopter lift involved moving fencing materials over to Stickle Ghyll. As we are due to replace the fencing around the plantation on the left hand side of the ghyll, and since the helicopter was available we thought we'd take advantage. All the materials were carefully bundled together and flown up and we also had a few 20kg bags of grass seed flown up for re-seeding bare areas around the path.

Preparing the fencing materials

The next lift took place in Easedale, flying the bags of rock that we had previously filled over to the path at Helm Crag. The drop site was a tricky one as it is fringed by trees which means an extra long sling had to be used so that the helicopter had plenty of clearance while placing the bags in position.  Using a longer sling makes it more difficult for the pilot to drop the bags as accurately, and also increases the likelihood of getting tangled up in the trees.

The lift went on well into the evening but we managed to move everything to site and given the awkwardness of the drop site the pilot was spot on with where he put the bags.

Moving rock at Helm Crag

Our final lift was at Aira Force, where we flew in bags of slate for a section of stone footpath that we'll be working on later in the year and also several bags of gravel for resurfacing works.

Once again although there's a lot of tree coverage in the area the lift went extremely well and the materials were all moved to site in just a few hours.