Freezer Brrrn! Reporting back in!!!

So I spent this past weekend at Synchronicity's 7th Annual Xmas Tree Burn, a winter-camping event featuring an enormous fire made out of tinder-dry Christmas Trees.

This event was a ton of work for me, as I was co-ordinating the staging and hauling of over 300 Christmas trees from various sources around the Chicago area, and then making sure they were somehow dragged out to Southwest Michigan. Then we had to build an enormous sculpture out of them for torching. The Xmas tree medium is very rewarding in the long run, which is good, because it's a shit ton of hard work trying to get 'em all loaded up and ready to burn.

It didn't help this year that Southwest Michigan was in the midst of a major-serious cold snap, as has most of the upper Midwest been for a few days. We had temperatures bottoming out around 9-10 degrees, and that doesn't include the windchill, which actually took us down to negative 20!!!!!

Luckily the winds weren't sustained much, so we weren't just stuck in that kind of stuff all night, but we had to tell everyone to get a hotel room instead of camping out - that just would have been dangerous.

In spite of the weather, my friends and I managed to spend about 13 hours setting up for the whole thing and then watching the fire - we set up a little indoor area with a large area-heater, a dome and a sound system, and one of the most rewarding things was walking in there at around 11:00 and witnessing this little room in the frozen farmland of Michigan, packed to the gills like a happening bar in the downtown Chicago! The area-heater kept everyone inside warm, and for those outside, there was of course the enormous bonfire - probably about 25 feet tall, and 20 feet in circumference.

What an awesome experience! I really am a lucky bastard!

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTNxak01oAc"

You can hear my voice in the background especially about 3/4 of the way through - I'm the one explaining to some dude what Synchronicity is and how we do our thing.

Here are some pics: "http://www.flickr.com/photos/libidolounge/sets/72157603768390509/"