Pole dancing

With tipi poles that is. We spent the weekend in the Uintas cutting down tipi poles and having another great weekend camping. On Thursday it seemed that 20 poles would be nothing to cut down. On Sunday morning 20 poles seemed like a LOT.
Good thing we started working on Friday cutting down tipi poles. It took some work to saw them down but the most work came from pulling them out of the forest and back to camp. You see, 30 feet of tree is a lot. In the forest you look up and have to imagine ME standing on my shoulders 6 times and then you have to find the straight ones. No wobbles needed for tipi poles. Then comes the easy part. Sawing the tree off the stump. Once the tree is detached comes the hard part. You have to drag the poles out of the forest with the butts heading out. ( I guess you don't have to but it is the easy way) the hard part comes when you are trying to figure out how to down the tree so that you are positioned for the easy drag out of the forest. Next you hope that the tree makes it down to the ground with out hitting other trees or getting hung up on other trees. Then the hardest part. We started stacking our cuts in a pile in the forest so we could keep cutting and then work on getting them out of the forest to camp. That's tricky you see because everything starts looking the same. Even when you think you find a place that you will never forget once you go back out hunting trees it takes some work to find your pile again. Then you have to haul all of your cuts out of the forest. This requires a lot of ziging and zaging while dragging usually two 30'+ trees on your shoulders (that's how I do it. If you are as tall as Doug you can just carry them in your hands near your side, but when I tried that it took me twice as long). This becomes known as pole dancing. We only got a few poles stripped while in the woods because we didn't want the whole trip to seem like work. Look for an upcoming post about what we did while we were not pole dancing.