Take a look at this beauty. This is my Christmas tree this year. I chopped it down and drug it off a mountain in knee deep snow myself. It's pretty great, right. True it's not the perfect pyramid you imagine when you think of the perfect Christmas tree. It's actually rather square...it has character. ;) This year I was quite lucky just to get a tree. Here's the story.
Every year my family and some neighbors go up to Soda Springs, Idaho the day after Thanksgiving to hunt for that perfect tree. It's one the most looked forward to traditions that my family does (at least I think so). We get up at 6 AM and head north and make to the ranger station about 8ish or so, get our permits and embark on our journey through snow covered mountain roads. We'll find a good spot that looks promising, pull of the side of the road, pile on our eskimo gear and trudge through the groves of pine trees searching for the tree to represent the Christmas season for the year. Once we find it, out come the hand saws and tape measures to cut it just the right size. Then once all the trees are cut and accounted for we all gather for lunch and Hot Cocoa and then load back up and head home. We can normally make it home by early evening, enough time to decorate the Christmas tree before it's time for bed.
This is what happens on a normal Christmas Tree Cutting Excursion. This year, however, was not a normal year...
It started out the same. We still got up at 6 AM, we still got to ranger station around 8, we still drove the snow covered mountain roads. It was those very snow covered mountain roads that caused the problem. A few days prior to this little adventure the 2010 Blizzard hit with a vengeance. Idaho, so I hear, got hit harder than Northern Utah did. The group we ventured with consisted of 10 vehicles, all of which were 4WD capable. Half of these vehicles were also pulling trailers, to make it easier to haul the trees home. There was so much snow from the storm that every car in our party got stuck at least once. The car I was riding in with my brother, his wife, and my nephew got stuck three times alone. The snow was knee deep on the roads and it wasn't the good snow that will pack down once driven on it was that soft powdery snow that you sink into really well. Let's just say that on this trip we spent more time digging people out of the snow than we did hunting for trees. Once we decided that it wasn't worth all that digging and that the roads were just to snowy to go further with anything but a snowmobile (which we didn't have) we decided to back track to the only semi decent spot and try our luck at it. It's about 3 in the afternoon by now, which is usually when we finish up and head home in a normal year (I told...not normal this time around). As you know around this time of year it gets dark at like 5. So we park and bundle up and search the woods for a tree as fast as possible. And that is why my tree look sthe way it does this year. It's basically the middle section of a semi decent tree, but with the disastrous events that took place this year I'm lucky to have a fresh tree that's not from a lot. Basically instead of saying that I just have a crappy tree...I say it's the cousin of Charlie Brown's tree. All it needs is a little love.
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