Trees, trees, and more trees!

Chris and I spent this past weekend up at our land and, as the title of this post suggest, we had a lot going on with our trees. We Chris cut down a large tree at the edge of our clearing so that we can now get the truck and pop-up circled around without having to do a lot of back and forth maneuvering to get the camper straightened out. We're so excited about this because it's going to make getting the camper set up that much easier!! And as he was getting the tree chopped up into pieces, I was hauling it into the woods and dumping it away from our campsite. Talk about a workout!

this is the tree we had to cut down. It was tall!  Chris is there at the base, getting ready to make his first cut.

That sucker was supposed to fall completely the other way, but it was so windy this day that it was just going to go whichever way it wanted...and it came straight at me!!! I was hoping to get video of it falling, but as soon as I saw the top coming my way, I stopped looking and ran!! It ended up falling across our driveway. Good thing we'd moved the truck before cutting the tree. :)

Chris got it cut up and I had it cleared away so we could get the truck back up to the clearing.

Chris got to use a "toy", this bobcat, to move some gravel we had delivered. We used the gravel to expand the clearing and shore up thin spots along the drive. You can't tell from this picture, but he had a huge grin on his face the whole time he was using this.

This is a picture of 100 white pine trees that we bought from the DNR to plant on our land. We actually got about 50 of them planted. The sun was out both days and really fried me...no, I have no pictures and even if I did, would not show them, but believe me, I'm red!!

This is Jason's tree, that we planted in a perfect spot and marked with pink marking tape on a tent stake, so that we can show him in the years to come that this one was planted just for him. Grow, baby, grow!

Finally, one more tree story...this one includes a black bear. Yep, Chris (and I) finally got to see a bear up near our land. He has wanted to see one since we bought the property a few years ago. This guy was trying to get across a road about a mile from our place and we couldn't believe what we were seeing. I'm so glad I had the camera in the front of the truck and could get to it in time before we passed him. He had run back to the edge of the woods when the car ahead of us passed him and we were able to slow down enough to get a good picture of him standing by the tree at the side of the road.

He was so cute, but I'm also saying that from the relative safety of the confines of the truck! I think I would have very different thoughts if he had come walking up to our campsite!!!