Beware: Huge Mean Bear

Beware, this post is really about cutting Christmas trees on the Dixie National Forest.  While we were tree hunting, though, we came across this sign, (which doesn't seem to be effective in scaring off the young lady in a pink jacket).  It is not an official Dixie sign, so I'm assuming that it was made by a camper who may have lost part of his cooler on a family outing over the summer.  There are no huge bears (i.e. grizzly or brown bears) in southern Utah, so I am assuming that one of the local black bears has decided that he likes robbing tents.  In any case, I'm glad to say that we didn't see even a small black bear on this day.  We did see one other person, though.  It was a guy in a pick-up truck.  He was, um, a bear hunter.  I'm not kidding.

Actually, all of that is a better story than the business about cutting a Christmas tree.  For that, we drove around in the warm, dry woods looking at white fir (Abies concolor) which has all but taken over the entire western United States.  We found a couple of relatively full seven footers and threw them in the Chev—one for The Homestead, and one for Grandma and Grandpa.  When we got them home, I counted the rings in their stems.  Our Christmas trees are between 30 and 40 years old.  It takes a long time for a white fir to grow to seven feet with the National Forests as dense as they are now.  In any case, we did our part to remove a couple of these from the underbrush.