Trees!

More trees falling around here.  With the Winter retreat season wrapping up, Mike Baker and I are going after all the trees that are marked around camp.  Some of them are in prominent places around camp like the West Side Ballfield and the East Side Chapel.  This means there are signs and fences and tetherball poles that we need to avoid.  So we used the Skytrak to give some of the trees a push in the right direction.  Most of the time Mike just puts a notch in the tree and cuts it so that it drops right where he wants it.

This one is on the way down.

All this cutting creates a mess, but with the help of Dan Haines and Mike Alchin we make quick work of it.  The trick becomes getting it to burn in the wet/snowy weather we've been having.  We discovered a couple of good tricks.  The first one is right out of Tim Houston's Thursday night camp out book:  Start small, then work your way up slowly.  The second is to run into the woods, tip over a dead pine tree, and use that to sustain the fire until the wet stuff is cooked dry.  Then it just needs someone to shuffle it around every once and a while.

This is the big mess.  We get most of it pretty quickly, but the smallest of the brush is hard to gather.

The burn pit takes some work, but I think it's sort of therapeutic.

There was still a lot of small brush laying around on the East Side Chapel driveway, but about 6 inches of snow fell on top of it, effectively saving us the trouble of cleanup for some time.  With that snow came the assurance that our last two weekends would really be Winter camp.  Barring an abnormal amount of sun and warm temperatures, we should be ready for the last weekend now with a little bit of touching up on the tubing runs.

If we aren't moving snow onto the tubing hill, it seems like we're moving it off of everything else.  So instead of loading up trucks with snow, most of the staff spent Friday plowing or removing snow from their areas of responsibility.  For me that's the West Side of camp.  I share about half of that with Mike Baker, while Reuben, Kevin and Jon Ford clean up the other part of West Side.  Since we were a little scattered this weekend I just ran the snowblower all over the West Side.  Thankfully somebody (Danny VanOrman?) used the tractor snowblower on the main paths, leaving me to take pass around camp with the smaller snow blower.  In the meantime Mike cleaned up the buildings in our area, and we were able to make it much easier to traverse the West Side.

My view for about 3 hours on Friday afternoon.  Thanks for the Ice Armor mittens mom!

So I'm thankful for snow this weekend, and hoping for a little bit more now.  I finally can get my snowshoes out for at least a little bit.  One last cleaning this season, one more retreat, and then it's on to Spring at Camp Barakel.