Bears! The number one threat to America destroyed!!!

This has been a rather eye opening experience for me being up here. The north country of the mission a striking contrast from my beloved valley but I do like it. We have a large area for just us. We cover 6 wards. We cover most of Snowflake and part of Taylor(which is basically Snowflake though they'll never admit it). It's so much different up here and I'm sorry but I should be struck down for this awful sentence. Bad grammar on my part, and I thought I learned something in high school. Guess not. Oh well all the things I learned in college are basically gone which is making me consider whether not to take some classes again.

Well being up here has changed somethings. I now have a hatred for the cold. It disgusts me. But I like the area this place is so small. We do a lot of service up here. Some examples. I have split wood a ton since coming up here. People need stuff to make a fire. I now know the difference between a maul, an axe, and a wedge. I used a grinder(an intimidating saw looking thing) to tear up some poles. And I got to paint a room(wasn't very good at that one).

Some things that happen up here to note. We play basketball every morning. And I'm really bad. I can't make a close range shot to save my life. Plus our zone leader is like the manliest man ever and can step on you like you're nothing making him quite intimidating in basketball. On Saturday we had missionary movie night. That was cool we show a movie at the theater next to the main street chapel once a month. A really awesome oppurtunity to teach people. Around here people think I'm the rich preppy missionary. I've been told my hair is too perfect and my clothes are too nice. I don't know where anyone is getting that stuff. My hair looks nice because I got an awesome haircut for free. It's not that great in fact my hair is like straw and uncontrollable. And reason 2 in my defense is I only have one pair of tube socks that I wear everywhere and they're like brown now and I'm too cheap to by other pairs because I know that I have pairs at home(and I've lost 3 since I've been out).

The potential here is great and we(as a mission) just have to set 9 more baptisms dates before the end of the year to hit 1200. This mission has never had over 1000. I think thats cool. And I think our companionship alone can contribute 5. It's gonna be sick!!! As for the title of the email its a cool story. We were going to an appointment and we got a call from one of our ward mission leaders wondering where we were. We told him and it turned out he had something to show us from hunting. He pulled up to us and we assumed it was the bobcat he was trying to get. We looked in the bed of the truck and saw this huge brown thing. Our jaws dropped. He had shot one of the biggest brown bears around right between the eyes. It's neck was 20 inches around! Just to let Stephen Colbert know the number one threat to America is being fought by Snowflake, Arizona. That's all I've got Laterz.

Love, Elder K-Wood