Down the road, a tree unlike any other shines in all its glory. A glowing Tannenbaum that makes you want to engage in joyous bacchanalia—it’s Mike Collins moose antler Christmas tree.
The moose antler tree is situated among a row of smaller, manicured Sitka spruce trees adorned with lights. Collins shared it’s not a “design,” per say, but a stacking of the antlers that give it a unique shape and size.
“They kind of lock together,” said Collins. “I try and shape it like a tree—it’s different every time. I start wide at the bottom and narrower until it starts to look like a Christmas tree.”
Collins, a well-known bush pilot, has been collecting shed moose antlers for many years. His massive collection led him to the idea of creating this Christmas tradition.
“They fall off the moose every year. In the spring, before the leaves come out on the bushes, I can see the antlers laying on the ground from the air,” said Collins. “If I can find a place to land reasonably close to where the antler is, I’ll land and pick them up. I ended up with a big stack of antlers. It’s fun to get them; it’s an adventure every time.”
After seeing displays down south of antler art pieces, he began crafting his creation.
“I’d seen different kinds of antlers made into sculptures, admiring what other people had done. I thought it would be cool to make a stack of them in the yard for a display with Christmas lights during the holiday season,” said Collins.
Collins has been creating the merry masterpiece for a decade. There was a big turn out the first year his family began sharing the moose antler tree—there was a buzz in town and lots of people stopped by to take pictures.
The sturdy structure—which stands at about 14 feet tall and weighs a couple thousand pounds, Collins guessed—is made mostly of the moose antlers he has found, as well as others he’s kept from hunts of his own. It’s a bit of a production to put it together, he said, but he and his family gather them up together. A skid-steer is used to move the antlers from point A to point B, and he said it takes some elbow grease to get them all placed.
“Each one of those [antlers] represents an experience that I had, and I remember, especially the ones that I hunted,” Collins said. “There are a lot of stories and life experience that came with collecting all those. I have very fond memories of experiences that I had and places that I’ve been. There are different stories to each piece. The tree represents that to me.”
Collin’s said the recent storm took the top off his tree, but confirmed to the Cordova Times it’s nothing he can’t fix.
