Fun with Smitty!

Where did I leave off? Thursday was more cutting, as was Friday. On Thursday, we did a PT hike. Oh my, thank God for California. Honestly, I never thought I would see those hikes in California as a good thing. But I am definitely seeing how much they helped me. I did really well on the PT hike, I was actually up toward the front and I didn’t slow down when I had my turn carrying a saw. Friday’s PT was the Gates of Hell six-mile run. I did pretty well on that too, so I seem to be making progress catching back up to where I was before I spent two weeks at sea level.

On Friday, Harrison, Coby and I worked with Smitty, who reminds me a lot of my dad. He’s so cool. He cut two tanks to start the day off. I thought Patrick was fast, woo! Smitty had both me AND Coby swamped out at one point. Then Coby and I switched off on a saw, until Smitty had me get on another one while Harrison was cutting. He let me take care of all of the small stuff for the most part so he could watch Harrison take some of the larger trees. Then I took some large ones as well and made some pretty good cuts, according to Smitty.

And then … I hung a tree. Grr. It was a pretty decent size. But this was the first time I hung a tree, so at least I managed to make it this far. Smitty walked me through how to get it down. First, he had me make an angled cut across the trunk to give it a way to slide apart, but that didn’t work. Then he had me to a window cut, which was really cool to learn. What you do is you cut a square window out of the center of the trunk. It was a little awkward from my angle because I’m so short (never has my short stature been so apparent as it has since I began wildfire). You knock out the cube that you’ve cut out and you put a sturdy tree limb through the window. Then you push on the limb and use it as a handle to roll the tree out of where it’s hung up. It was a little crazy, but still really neat to learn how to do it. Of course, it’s the kind of thing where I would have to have a really experienced B level sawyer observe and help me out with it, I can’t just go doing it on my own whenever I hang a tree.

After work on Friday, Smitty had all of AmeriCorps for a potluck on the behalf of the Forest Service. It was incredibly nice of them, and it was a lot of fun to hang out with everyone off the clock. Smitty’s house is amazing, it’s beautiful and there’s so much to it. He really is a cool guy, and his wife is so sweet.

Eventually, everyone left Smitty’s and a handful of us went down into Nederland for the evening. I crashed at the bunkhouse for the night and headed back to Boulder on the bus the next morning. I spent most of my day on Pearl Street again. I went grocery shopping today. Yes, we seem to be settling in nicely down here in Boulder.