The Bulldozer
And Missing The Road Allowance And Stuff.
Friday mornings at the cottage are generally pretty quiet; sure you may hear a chainsaw, maybe a powertool or Andrew shooting at something. But the good thing is that if there is any noise it doesn't last long. Andrew runs out of bullets, whatever needed a powertool is fixed and no one is clearcutting hundreds of acres. So it was indeed a surprise to hear some heavy equipment in close proximity one Friday morning. It could have been any number of things, but what it wasn't was short-lived. As the morning continued, it also seemed to get louder and be accompanied by the higher pitched whirring of two chainsaws. And that's when you get concerned. What on earth is happening across the lake? We own the Waterfall lot across the lake, and that heightens the concern.
It needed some investigation.
At noon I took the ATV around the road and up the trail (to where a smaller trail disappears into the forest) to see what was going on. The little trail wasn't little anymore. There was a pickup truck parked on the trail. And beyond it was a cleared muddy swath, with rocks and trees and overturned earth pushed to the sides, headed straight for our Waterfall property.
Cousin Mike
I parked the ATV and walked north and down the rock face to the creek that helps to mark the southwest corner of the Waterfall lot. I discovered that the 'engineers' had set a 15' long four foot diameter culvert into the creek so they could get their equipment across. Whatever was clearing the path had tracks, and I looked back up the rock face wondering how they were planning to get the machine back out when they were done. I could tell that the road they had cleared already had crossed onto ur property. As I was taking some pictures on my iPhone I heard someone coming towards me from deeper in the forest. I called out to the gent as he came into sight asking if they were building another 407. He replied in a friendly manner 'no, it wasn't going to be a new highway.' I asked if he was the owner, Paul. No, he was Paul's cousin Mike. And after a brief bit of small talk as we both walked back up towards his truck and my ATV that included the news we had purchased the Waterfall lot last summer, I asked Cousin Mike if he would pass along a message to Paul (who was way back in the forest): if he was ever thinking of selling, we'd be interested in buying.
End Of Day One
The construction continued for the rest of the day. Around 6pm it seemed they had gotten back out to where their pickup truck was. So after dinner we hopped back on the ATV to go see what was going on. We saw the bulldozer that had done the clearing. It wasn't as big as it had sounded, but obviously it was up to the task. I was amazed they had managed to get it back up the rock face I had walked down. There wasn't much else to do other than take a couple of photos. The deer flies were ravenous, so we scooted back around the lake to the cottage and tried not to think about it much.
Day Two - More Work And The First Meet
Saturday morning was clear and sunny. The bulldozer and chainsaws started up around 8am and seemed to be even farther into the bush and closer to the lake. But around noon the noise started to lessen and we thought that maybe they were done, and maybe the dozer was on its long trek out to be loaded at the highway. Around the same time as the noise started to abate, Jack dropped by with his tractor to help level out the ground under where the new addition was being constructed. Jack managed to tidy things up in short order. So as we were having a beer and catching up on some of the news around the lake, a guy pulls up in a pickup truck, neither of which I recognized.
'Heard someone was looking for me?' was the call from down the hill on the driveway. The gent walked up and introduced himself as Paul, our neighbour from across the lake. I made a move to go shake his hand, but given it was COVID protocols, just said hello and that it was great to finally meet him. I explained that we'd heard all the machinery over the past day and a half and had just been curious what was going on. He repeated cousin Mike's story that he just wanted to make access to his land slightly easier, and that they had cleared a little area at the top of ther hill above the current shack where he and his family would be able to camp.
I told him that was great, and that I guess they had run the dozer up the unopened road allowance before turning east towards the lake so that the track wasn't on the property we'd bought from Kelly last year. He looked a little taken off guard. He asked when we'd bought Kelly's land, and how much had we paid for it. And I told him. He asked if I was serious about buying his property, and I said yes, for fair market value. Then there was some posturing as he tried to get me to toss out a number and I asked him what he thought was reasonable - he said he'd take $500k. So given that, he gave me his cell phone number and said if I had an offer he'd be willing to listen. We said our good-byes and that was that.
Day Three - The Quiet Day
Sunday we simply laid low. Because Paul didin't live that far away, we didn't know if he'd be back having a little explore around his property. The question really was had there been any chance that he had trespassed with the bulldozer? And how would we know that without a full blown survey? And if he had, what was there that could be done about it? Sunday is not the day when questions like that can be answered...
Day Four - The Map, The Lawyer, The Negotiation
Monday morning involved an early morning journey around the lake to see the state of things. Things were in quite a state. I was able to get the ATV in to a point where the bulldozer had made a hard left turn to head north into the neighbour's property. That location was about 300 feet from the shore of the lake and generally right on the property line between the two parcels of land. So I walked out to the lake along that line and set my phone on top of the corner survey marker and saved a set of coordinates using a compass app on my phone. From there, and using the compass to stay on the correct bearing, I measured the 857 feet to the northwest corner of the property. Luckily, the surveyor who did all the work back in the 1990's had piled rocks on top of the survey bars to both protect them and make them easier to find for the next person who came along. I again set my phone down on the top of the survey bar and saved a set of coordinates.
Now that 2 known points were established I walked back to the ATV and drove the bulldozer path and saved a set of coordinates in the middle of the 'road' at each turn. I could tell that the bulldozer had done some serious trespassing, but the extent of the trespass wasn't fully clear.
Once back at the cottage and after emailing myself the coordinate file, I loaded the coordinates into Google Earth to see how things looked. You be the judge.
The red lines represent the property lines of the Waterfall lot we had purchased the previous summer. The green line is the path the bulldozer took to get to our neighbour's property that lies to the north of the Waterfall lot. The total distance that the bulldozer was entirely on our property improving our neighbour's access route was just shy of 800 feet. Now, during the conversation on the Saturday, our neighbour had admitted that in a couple of spots he may have strayed five feet onto our property to avoid knocking down a big tree or to avoid a large rock. From what I could tell, the bulldozer had gone a little beyond five feet in a couple of spots. So, what action to take next?
Call your lawyer. And he was very helpful. What happened wouldn't be considered criminal trespass, but civil trespass. And there are limited things one can do about that, with the most drastic being taking the trespasser to court for damages etc. My lawyer suggested that the first thing to do is to contact the trespasser and make it clear that we have an issue with the trespassing and that the issue needed to be resolved. So I wrote our neighbour a text message indicating that, and included a copy of the image of where the bulldozer had blazed a trail. There was a bit of back and forth trying to find a time to have a phone call, but he and I were able to settle on a time to talk that evening.
The call went well and resulted in a fair market sale of the Land Across to us. The deal closed at the end of June and apart from the neighbour never coming to pick up his aluminum boat (which has since been donated), things went without a hitch. We added another 10 acres to our property holdings across the lake and now don't need to ever worry about someone building a cottage directly across from ours.
The Land Across
We've been to explore the Land Across and the Waterfall a few times in the late summer after the bugs thinned out and have discovered a few interesting things: an oak-pine tree (pine and oak branches growing out from the same trunk), sheep skulls, another small lake, unique rock formations and a number of interesting sites that one could build on - these may be future opportunites to sever off the back halves of these parcels and keep the lake side. Those are plans for some later time; the primary focus of this year remains to complete the Great Room addition to the cottage itself.
Oddly, the road that was bulldozed through the Waterfall parcel of land to access the Land Across hasn't turned out to be of much use. There is one area where the road literally falls through a narrow cut in a rock ledge. Even in 4x4 and low gear on the ATV it's an unsafe struggle to get back up from the bottom, and in the winter it would be likely impossible. There is however a far gentler path through the property that gets around the need to use the road, and so we will be manicuring this trail in the late fall. We would like to maintain a few trails through the properties in order to enjoy the rugged nature during the seasons; one needs to weigh the downsides that come with well groomed trails as they tend to invite trespassers, so perhaps at some juncture we will need to install a gate to help reduce the liklihood of unwanted visitors.