The Cutting of the Christmas Trees...Part 2...

I know this is long overdue…I’m just recovering now, though I still have a good bruise.

My younger, but taller sister, Polly, and I spent the night at her home in Manti, UT, so we could get up at 6:45 a.m. on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, and stand in line in the freezing cold (10 degrees F) to get our Christmas tree tags ($5.00 each – very economical). We didn’t get there until 7:20, later than we’d planned, but the line wasn’t too long yet. We were wearing about 6 layers of clothing, along with a blanket and hot chocolate, and were ready for the 40-minute wait until the forest service would be there at 8 to sell the tags. I spaced my hot cocoa appropriately, to keep me warm the whole time, and at 8:00, I was just starting to feel a little chilly on my face, fingers, and toes. Great planning!




8:00 came and went, and we started getting concerned. Then someone came and said that the Forest Service wouldn’t be there until 9:00. I thought my toes were going to freeze and fall off! It got really cold in that last hour right as the sun was coming up. We finally bought our tags and went home to warm up. Polly made breakfast for us, and I took a brief nap, and rested, trying to warm up. Finally around 11 or so, Polly said we needed to get going to cut our trees, so we got dressed up again, and left to go up Manti Canyon to a place that Polly knows has good trees. She’d been scouting a little, and found a place that “no one goes to get their trees”. I asked if we could just take 4-wheelers or horses to go and get them. I should have been more concerned with her answer – “The 4-wheelers and horses can’t get up there”, but I was still caught up in the whole magical dream of it all. I mean…how bad could it really be, right?!



We got up there, and ended up hiking up about ½ mile straight up the hillside. Yeah…I wouldn’t want to ride a horse up that hillside…I’d rather take my chances on my own two feet (or my butt, whichever was more convenient). I found a good tree that was about 10’ tall, and yes, I actually chopped it down with a hatchet...





(well, I mostly chopped it down, and sawed the last little bit with a handsaw…Polly got tired of waiting for me to chop the whole thing down because I’d been working on it for about 20 minutes already – with breaks). Consequently, the base of my perfect Christmas tree is now massacred, but it’s okay, we’ll have to cut that part off when we cut it down to go into the stand anyways. We packaged it and drug it over the hill ready to go down the steep part.


Then we went back over the top of the hill and while Polly was scouting for her tree, I was taking pictures and enjoying nature. This is the last picture I took before "The Incident"...



This is where it got interesting…I didn’t want to hike all over the mountain while Polly scouted for her tree, so I was just walking around minding my own business, resting here and there, taking pictures and waiting for her to call me when she found it. That was when I had a great idea to take a picture from off the top of a big rock (waist to chest height). I didn’t set my things down, but thought I could easily get up on the rock. I was wrong. I mis-judged it, and lost my balance…next thing I know, I’m flying through the air backwards, and I realize that I am going to land flat on my back from about 3-4 feet off the ground. It was not good. Many things flashed through my mind…like some of the trauma patients I’ve taken care of with spinal injuries and back pain forever, concerns about a back injury if I did land flat on my back, and wishing I’d actually gotten in the shower that morning so I’d have clean underwear on (which I hadn’t) just in case I was going to be really injured. I think I landed flat on my back, and while the upper and middle parts of my back hit the dirt (thankfully!!!), my tailbone landed directly on the smaller pointed rock I’d been using to climb up on the bigger rock. Yep…I landed on my butt. It hurt SOOO bad!!! Polly heard my yelp, and yelled out asking if I was okay. I answered that I was fine, but I still wasn’t sure at that point. I immediately got up and started walking around, and was happy to see I still had normal movement and feeling in all of my extremities…it was just my butt that hurt really bad (REALLY BAD!), specifically, my tailbone. I’ve hurt my tailbone a couple of times before, and it felt a lot like those times. Then I started getting nauseous and almost dizzy, and was about to sit down so I didn’t fall, but was stripping clothes off instead (not all of them – just the top layers!) to take advantage of the cold air outside – to bring me out of the painful shock my body was going into. I had a big wave of nausea flood over me, and just didn’t feel great for quite a while. When I finally recovered, I looked at the rock I'd landed on and realized that I actually broke the rock! Of course of all the things I took pictures of that day, oddly enough, I didn’t take any pictures of the place I was injured.

I finally recovered enough and collected my things, and walked (very stiffly, and a little bow-legged with my toes pointed out at a 45-degree angle which felt the best) over to where Polly had found her 14' tree and was cutting it down with the handsaw (5 minutes). I laid out the tarp to drag her tree down the mountain on. I wish I’d gotten more pictures, but I didn’t because I was no longer feeling good…I had to measure every movement.





I was somehow able to help her get her tree over to the down-hill slope and while she pulled her tree down the mountain, I went and got mine, and pulled it down the mountain as well. Yep…I was still able to haul my tree off the mountain, though I no longer wanted to go down on my butt, and was VERY careful not to fall on it again. We got them loaded in the truck.





As we drove down the mountain, I made a make-shift “donut” with my two sweaters under my legs to hold my butt off the seat so I could tolerate the drive without hurting too much!

Here's Polly next to her truck with the "controversial" bumper sticker!



One of the first things I did when we got home, was check my bum in the mirror for a bruise. NOTHING! All that pain and nothing to show for it! The next morning, I found a bruise (black) the size of a silver dollar. The day after, it doubled in size. I’d put a picture up, but I don’t want my blog to be tagged as “inappropriate"! Overall it was fun, but I think that if I’m going to do this again, I need to have a boyfriend next time!