Our Christmas Tree

It all began when I started putting up the old artificial tree. It looked pretty good once it was up, but I had some trouble understanding the lights. It appeared that there were none that had plugs on each end, so how does this work? Ben got home and said, "lets go to town and see if we can find some new lights and maybe a tree". On the way there Ben told me about how much he loved going to the mountains to get a tree, and how it's been one of his favorite Christmas traditions, one that he would like to start with me. At first, as always, I was resistant. Ben explained to me the pro's (and Ben always knows a million) and slowly began to break me down. By the end of the night we had decided to look into getting a tree permit.

The next day Ben called about it and they said that a permit could be acquired at a gas station in Malad. When we got there they said that all they had was BLM. They said that Cal Ranch in Pocatello had Forest Service tags. At that point we didn't know what to do. We could wait until the friday and drive out to Malad again, to their Forest Service station, or go now to Pocatello and just get it over with.
We laughed at ourselves all the way to Pocatello, spent an hour trying to find Cal Ranch and finally got our precious tree tag.

Ben had to work the next day. It felt like it took us forever to get hunting. Finally Friday came and we headed off into the great white mountains.

The drifts were so deep I don't know what we would have done without snowshoes, we definitely wouldn't have gotten very far.


Our dogs had a terrible time if they got out of our tracks. They seemed to be happy to be out and about though, and we were happy to have them with us. We hiked around for maybe two hours. We weren't finding anything good, all the trees were either crooked, too sparse or had a parasite. We were getting tired, so we decided to try one last spot. As we hiked up the hill and along a ridge, Ben started singing, "do you see what I see?" I looked up and behold, there it was, and it was glorious.

We wrapped the top part of the tree in a tarp and tied a rope around it,
then tied the rope to us (I felt like a sled dog) and started back. It was hard and I was between Ben and the tree so I kept getting knocked over. Ben said he'd pull the tree and I said I'd blaze the trail and that ended up working much much better. Both jobs were tough, but together it made the overall task fairly easy. We only had to stop a few times, to decide which path we would need to take. I was afraid that it would take a really long time to get back to the car, but we were there in no time. Ben hoisted the tree off the ground and tossed it onto the car as if he were Hercules. He laughed at my dropped jaw.

Now the tree is sitting beautifully in the living room and I agree with Ben, this is a wonderful Christmas tradition. We really got the snowshoeing bug back too, so if anyone wants to go then lets.