I live on the wrong side of the river and take a raft when the river it too high to hop across on rocks. This is half the year. Sometimes it's unsafe to take a raft across in which case I stay on whatever side I'm on. Here is a nice picture of 'Shoemaker Creek' from my side of the 'West Fork, Millicoma':


Note_1: The West Fork can rise almost to the level of the road. One option was to run a galvanized pipe under the river, but I decided against it because trees and boulders roll down the river when the water is high.

Here is a picture of the line crossing the river...about a 100' span.


Note_1: A 1 inch plastic pipe (which you see crossing the river) goes from my tank to my neibors property at the mouth of Shoemaker creek to supply them with water. A 1/2 inch line from the pump tee's into this line. At the tank, a setup of valves allows the supply line and feed line to be the same (see tank page.)

Note_2: I used 1/8 inch cable. I was able to pull the cable and pipe (empty) by hand to this level of tension, so the forces are not excessive.

Note_3: On the road side, the cable attaches to a myrtle tree via a hole through a large branch in which I put a rod. On the other side, I put a large eye-bold in the fir tree and attached a pully to it running the cable to an anchor on the ground. this makes it easy for me to drop the cable. Neither tree should have been damaged in the process (although I had to climb each a number of times with spurs which probably didn't do them any good.)

I thought about how to attach the plastic pipe to the cable and this is what I came up with. It works well, and I was able to easily slide the plastic pipe one way or another, but note that there are no hose-clamps over the span...this would have changed things.


Note_1: The rings are sawed off chunks of 2 inch plastic pipe. They have tiny holes drilled in them which allowed me to wire them all together with stainless wire. Every so often, the stainless wire is stuck to the 1/8 suspension cable with u-bolts.

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