Woodcutting Woes

Warning! Woodcutting may be hazardous to your health…

Today we went up to Sore Acres to get some firewood and fall a few alder for Don. The skies were sunny and blue, the weather warm… who would have known that danger lurked in the future???

Before Don headed back down towards home, we all got to take a shot with his golf ball launcher. It was really fun! And to think that big guns were the safest part of our day…

   We quickly fell into a rhythm, each with our own job to do. Chris fell the tree, Andy limbed it with the hatchet, I piled the limbs into a pile, Chris and Andy cut the wood into pieces, Zack and Will loaded it into the quad trailer and drove it down and stacked it into our trailer. It was quite an effective system…

 

This continued for a bit, until… Chris caught his jeans in the saw and ripped them. Figuring this would be the most exciting event of the day, I captured it on film. Little did I know…

After the trailer was all filled up, we set out to fall a few more trees and  stack up a few more rounds to come back for the next time…

Just when we were taking down the last bunch of little alder before heading home for the day, I heard the words you don’t want to hear coming from a person using a chainsaw. “I cut myself.” Now I had already heard this once today, so I didn’t panic. One of the boys asked, “Did it cut your skin?” When the answer was “yes”, boys took off running to see the damage. Since he wasn’t yelling or passing out and shortly thereafter continued to work, I still did not panic. Then William returned to where I was standing, camera in hand and reassured me with, “Here, I took this picture for your comfort.” The picture of a giant red, bloody gash didn’t really do much for my comfort. But then when he smiled and zoomed the picture back to more realistic proportions, I again realized there wasn’t need to panic.

After getting the last tree down, my injured lumberjack trudged back down the hill to the van (and our first aid kit) and left me and the boys to gather up the gear.

Needless to say, that’s the most danger I care to have while woodcutting. So to celebrate our good fortune at not being hurt much worse, we stopped for chicken and ice cream at The Chicken House in Woodland! 

Camp Deep Creek Day 1

With weather near 100 degrees, we figured we’d better enjoy what little summer we got. So we packed up the trailer, bought a few inner tubes and headed down to the creek for a few days of camping.

Shortly after arriving (and setting up and a bit of  swimming), we drove the 5 minutes up to Dad and Mom’s for Amy Lynn’s birthday party. It was fun getting to celebrate with everyone and have tons of yummy desserts!

It also gave us some time to air up all the inner tubes. It was a good thing we did it the day before our river trip since quite a few leaked! But we got them patched up and ready to go…

Camp Deep Creek Day 2

Monday morning we got two surprise calls from the Amys saying that they had decided to come tubing with us after all!!!

both Andy and Betsy wanted the big stick…

  

I think Betsy won

the boys did a bit of work damming up the creek while we waited to leave

We had great hopes of going in the morning and then again with Frank after work. But when we arrived at McIvor, we saw the sign… 4 to 5 hours from the Park to Barton Bridge (about 10 to 15 minutes from Deep Creek)!

Our hopes of having lunch soon, much less doing two trips, were dashed. But we aired up the tubes, donned our life jackets (this made some of the reluctant members of our group feel more confident), slathered on some sunscreen, tied our tubes together (all except Andy and Zack) and headed downstream…

 That’s the last of our pics for the day. We weren’t willing to risk taking our camera and didn’t want to spend the money on a waterproof disposable. So you’ll have to take my word on the fact that the river was very pretty and there were lots of other rafters on the Clackamas that day. Most of our fellow tubers were very respectful and enjoyable to be with, until we hit Barton Park… Ugh!  We also learned that although it is really fun to be tied together with your sisters on the river for over 4 hours just jabbering away, it’s really hard to control where you go; especially when you come to rapids or rocks or shallows or really big logs sticking up out of the water (and one of you goes on one side and the other two don’t…).

By the time we got back we were all starving, a bit sunburned and exhausted! It’s amazing how tired you can get just sitting on a tube floating downriver for 4 + hours! Oh, and rescuing two girls with a leaky raft. Way to go, Chris and Will!!! But all in all, we had a terrific time and are already thinking about next year’s trip…

Charlie didn’t get to go tubing with us but he had fun in them anyway

  

Charlie telling us a bedtime story

Camp Deep Creek Day 3

Day three was a huge day at Camp Deep Creek! The weather was perfect, we spent the whole day with family and friends, and watched Charlie grow up a little bit right before our eyes… Yup, it was a very good day!

Nothing gets you going like a good pancake breakfast

  

playing Whoonu

we hit the water at 10:30am and started working on the water slide

the “double stack” worked great!!!

 

Charlie wasn’t quite sure about the whole water thing at first. He wanted someone to hold his hand crossing the creek. But he saw how much fun Maggie and the rest of us were having and decided to join in the fun. By the end of the day he was running up the bank, jumping on the tube, racing the boys down the slide (sometimes even passing them on the way down), jumping back onto shore and doing the whole thing again. He was pretty excited when the Paulsons showed up for new competition… He probably raced up and down about 40 times in a row! We were so proud of Charlie!  

even Grandpa had to try after Charlie had so much fun