26 June 2012--Fires, red eyes and chainsaws

We had another unexpected wild ride this weekend. It began on Thursday with a fire. Thirty miles south of us a fire was started in the foothills by plinkers shooting at explosive targets. How dumb is that? The entire state has been red flagged for fire danger. After last year's abundant rain, lots of grass grew on our bare hills. This year, with no snow, and the driest May on record, not to mention a week in the 90s with strong winds out of the south, all of Utah is a tinderbox. Around noon I smelled smoke and went outside for a look see. The sky over Mount Olympus was a greasy yellow color. Then smoke started to obscure the mountain. The smell was horrible. By evening the smoke had permeated everything, our eyes were red and burning, and our throats were soar. 

This fire blew up so fast that two neighborhoods were evacuated. While the firemen were fighting this fire, two more started in the hills even closer to us. Sleeping was pretty miserable. Friday was equally smoky. Saturday was hot and windy with more smoke. Finally, Saturday afternoon the wind changed direction and the air cleaned up some.  

Like Mary Poppins, David showed up on Saturday when the wind changed. I needed him to bring his chainsaw on a stick and take off two branches that were rubbing on the roof. With the wind, these branches were banging on the house something severe. It is hard to sleep when you can hear the trees scraping against the roof. 

David with a chainsaw is just like me with a hose in my hand--you don't know when to quit. In a very short time we had a huge mess on the back lawn. 

We took out four trees, a huge thicket of pfitzers, and did a lot of assorted trimming. 

 About now we are realizing that we need to rent a green waste trailer to dispose of all the limbs. This will be our third bin this year. 

Yes, we are definitely taming the jungle. Jack swears it is our last bin of the year. We shall see.

 We quit for dinner then collapsed. I spent Sunday cutting the huge piles of limbs into 6 foot long piles so we could get them into the trailer easily, plus you can load more in that way.

 Then on Sunday, Jack got out his chainsaw and we went to town in the front yard. Where Jack is standing in this picture we took out three pine trees that were stunted from growing under a maple and a blue atlas cedar. 

In addition, we took out a dead aspen, a large grove of elms that had been taking over in the driveway surround and trimmed out more dead branches on existing trees and removed a 10 foot high thicket of wild rose and brambles. 

The trailer arrived on Tuesday and we had it packed and ready to go on Thursday. The temps were in the high 90s and low 100s during all this work. We were pretty exhausted. 

We filled this trailer--it is 8 feet wide, 16 feet long and 6 feet high. We were on the verge of taking a couple more trees down but common sense prevailed.