Grand escape & Christmas tree hunting

I just had to take the day off work Wednesday and go with Paul to clean up a little job over at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last week.  (In my defense I had worked 4 extra days for other people recently, and our two practicum students were there to help Lynne while I was ditching...still I did feel a little guilty.)  We had put stone on 3 hydro stations (water filling places at the Kaibab trail head, the back country permit office and by the main lodge) and needed to clean up and wash them to be finished.  The gate on the road to the North Rim was locked up right by Jacob Lake, so with combination in hand we headed over after picking up a Christmas tree permit in Fredonia and getting a couple of cookies to go with our lunch at Jacob Lake. On the way we saw several coyotes  that ran off making it hard to get their picture, but one was so busy hunting a little critter under the snow that he didn't care about us staring at him and we watched the whole listening, digging and gobbling up process.  We were too excited to think of turning off the truck, so our movie didn't turn out too well with the vibrations and noise going on unfortunately.  Not something you see every day. At the rim we only saw a few rangers and a couple of other guys finishing up some work.  It was like having the whole area to ourselves. After cleaning up a couple of the signs we took our lunch break and heated up some water for hot chocolate to dunk our cookies in.  Paul had made us some turkey, apple, pecan, lettuce, cranberry sauce sandwiches that were mmm good.  After we finished up we took a little walk to get some pictures.  The trail down to Bright Angel Point was pretty icy, so we just went part way.  On the way out while Paul was checking to make sure everything was done, I saw my first Kaibab squirrel and tried hard to chase him down to get his picture.  He wasn't very cooperative, but I did get one fairly decent shot.  Then we took off to start the tree hunt.  We saw gobs of perfect ones inside the park boundaries of course.  They were more scarce in the legal area, but we found a couple of spruces and trekked through not too deep snow to harvest them.  (One for us and one for the Smiths.)  The rest of the journey we enjoyed the scenery, sunset and reading more of the Thomas Monson book.