Wood Adventures

In October Jason and I took the little kids out to Deadhorse and Campbell Lake to get wood. We borrowed trailers and vehicals from various family members and friends and headed out to get wood for the winter. This is a great place to get wood because there is so much standing dead wood, thanks to beatle kill. You can see the whole hill behind the lake is just ravaged.

The down side to going there is that it is about 80 miles one way. So we tryed to make the most out of the trip and get as much wood as possible. We had a truck bed and two trailers. We got directions and a map from the Forrest Service office in Klamath. They told us that when we got to a certain spot we would find the wood in piles already fell and limbed. That was exactly what we found when we got to the lake. Several piles of it waiting for us to load up. We got the truck bed about halfway loaded when a Forrest Service truck pulled up to us and told us that the wood we were loading was for campsites, not us. We knew it was too good to be true. He was nice though, and let us keep what wood we had loaded. Evidently, the office in Klamath was giving out bad information, he had to tell this same thing to two people before us the same day. When he was done crushing our dreams, he told us that the tire on one of our trailers was flat. That was the beginning of a long bad day. We had no spare for the trailer, and the leak was so bad that it wouldn't hold air after we put in "tire stuff" and filled it back up with air. We couldn't drive the trailer home with this tire, so we jacked the trailer up and took off the wheel and put it in the back of the car. Jason found a spot, and started cutting wood while I drove the back service roads to Paisly Or. When I finally arrived in Paisley an hour later they had one service station. I filled up the huge gas tank of the Escalade, and prayed that they could fix the tire that is appreantly older than dirt. The locals gave me weird looks, probably because of the luxery suv I was driving. This kid was the only one working the gas station/ service station and he was running his but off.

Across the street from the service station is a nice little cafe where the kids and I grabbed a drink. Inbetween the two on the corner of the main road through town was this "Deer Hide Deposit" bucket. That's small town Oregon for ya!
So about an hour after I arrived, and $60 in gas, and $ 65 in tire tube later I was on my way back to where Jason was. When I arrived to Jason he only had about 6 tree rounds loaded. I had been gone for almost 3 hours, so I was very dissapointed. The reason was, not because he was taking it easy, but because the chain on the chain saw was so dull it was taking 15 minutes and a whole lot of man power to get through one section of tree. After witnessing this for about an hour, I got fed up with it. We decided to just limb them and cut them into six foot sections. Then we both picked them up, and threw them in the tailer. We ended up being out there well past dark, but we got alot of wood. It was such a long drive and a whole day, so the pressure to make it worth it was on. By this point it was also getting to be an expensive trip! All in all a good long days worth of hard work, and heat for the winter.