Earlier this week Garrick, Timmy, Aubree & me were determined to cut us down a tree in the forest!! Garrick's genius idea - haha :)!!

Well we realized it's pretty tough to just find the perfect Christmas tree in the forest (if we could find a forest not owned by someone), especially right off some rugged road! :) So... I said Garrick, we just gotta bite the bullet & get us a tree from a lot up in Apple Hill. So we drove around Apple Hill... after awhile we ended up getting into North Apple Hill, when we discovered this cute mountain full of HUGE Christmas trees. It's called Cole's Mountain... And owned by a "Mountain Man" - well, kind of... He looked like a mountain man, so I asked him if he was. He said he works at Safeway (So.... although he "looked" like a mountain man & owned a mountain - I guess, in a way even though he works at Safeway, he'll be my mountain man for the sake of my story).

He said he would charge us $35 to get any Christmas tree we wanted. Now these Christmas tree's are 30 feet + tall, so we did like "Home Alone" & chopped off the top of this huge, 10 year old tree (Timmy counted the rings).

We had a really great time & it did feel like a real hill-side forest, we cut the tree down at sunset & the mountain man was telling us all these stories of bears, mountain lions, bobcats & other wildlife. As we were loading up our tree, we spotted a herd of 4 deers (beautiful!!) & about three dozen quail flying above us (the mountain man reminded me that the Quail is our state bird). It was too dark to get a good picture of the wildlife, but none the less a great Christmas tree cutting down experience. Aubree thought it was great & strange at the same time... She wondered why we were bringing this big tree inside our home.