Posted on 02/25/2022 10:05:42 AM PST by fireman15
đź‘Ť
My college gave us permission to a take a tree from the back lot to use with PT log drills. They refused to provide either an axe or a saw. Being inventive ROTC Rangers, we took the sucker with ten turns of “det cord”. Truly an evening of broken windows and other excitement.
I’ve got a Tree I am Slowly
and thoughtfully trimming.
Just pulling off dead Branches and sizing it up
For a Good trim.
If you got that down to three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third you’d have a haiku. Your nearly there.
Tried, I can’t do it.
My syllables are all Wrong.
I’ll just have to Stop.
.
My Haiku for Rey.
At least I don’t have to rhyme.
All I got is Time.
.
I’ll be here all week.
Sit back and have a good meal.
So Please try the Veal!
Haiku,
Message to self.
Voice to print
Bumperstickers.
Never look up why chainsaws were invented. Yeow.
I was about 80 feet up on a tree that was between our house and our garage. On the way up I was cutting the branches and dropping them. There was only about three feet between the tree and our house. One of the branches caught a little wind on the way down and punched through the roof of our garage and didn’t stop until the tip was about a foot from the hood of my wife’s car. It wasn’t that big of a branch. It is no wonder that they are known as “widow makers” when they are caught up in a tree waiting for a gust to shake them loose.
You have far more experience than I do. I have only cut trees that have been on our own or my father's property. He has 40 acres of timber up by Mt. Rainier but he doesn't want to cut the trees down and they are mostly on steep terrain as well and unmanageably large as well. It used to be that with trees for logging it was the bigger the better, but that is not really the way that it is these days. The mills are now set up for logs up to only a certain diameter.
The problem that we have at our home is that the 2nd growth fir trees around our house were planted about 100 years ago, but their numbers were thinned out in a way when houses were built here 50 years ago that many get unobstructed wind on the top of the hill that we live on. They have now reached a height that after we have a lot of rain, they come down fairly frequently in windstorms, especially after they were weakened by bark beetles, and many died after we had a few dry years a decade or so ago.
Every time the wind starts gusting up past around 50 mph we wonder which one will come down next. Of course, we lose a lot of branches as well which knocks out the power frequently and makes it look like a bomb went off in our yard and driveway frequently. It usually happens after I have just gotten everything cleaned up and looking good.
Two trees from our property have hit one of our neighbor's house twice. The base of the trunk on the last one that came down and wiped out his entire back deck was more than 3 feet across. We were just glad no one was hurt. I cut down more than a dozen tall ones after that. Fortunately, we had an area to drop them in with no structures by falling most of them down the hill. But the hill is very steep and it took a lot of rigging work to drag the big pieces back up the hill so that we could cut them into lumber with a portable sawmill. It was much more work than actually cutting them down.
Fortunately, tall firs are fairly predictable, but we did have a couple which wanted to go the wrong way. But with a lot of 1/2” wire rope attached way up and snatch blocks we were able to convince them to go where we wanted them to.
The biggest challenge that we had was when I intentionally dropped a huge fir on a big maple. I assumed that the heavy fir tree would split the maple in two and make it easier to cut down, but it didn't and the tree was suspended up in the air going down the steep hill.
I initially assumed we would be able to pull it up the hill and out of the maple. But it was wedged in tightly and even with a portable winch anchored to another tree and a lot of mechanical advantage from multiple snatch blocks we could not get it to budge. I ended up doing a lot of cutting in very precarious positions to get it lose. It took a lot of effort. Just pulling all that cable and gear up and down the darned hill was about all I could handle. It was not even all that hot out, but I was sweating like a pig in my “lumberjack” protective clothing. What a mess!
I was underneath the fir log cutting on the fork in the maple on the underside to weaken it, but not drop the log on myself. It was unbelievably stupid. If my wife had seen what I was up to she would have had a stroke. We were eventually able to break the fork after I weakened it, by pulling the base of the log back and forth with our rigging.
We are planning on moving soon and I have had enough of messing around with tall trees. I have looked at property that had trees of a manageable size that I could cut up without a lot of trouble with a portable sawmill. The trees that we have currently are so large that only big mill in the area can now handle them. They are now all set up for smaller logs. My brother-in-law is a logging truck driver with his own business, and he just laughed at me when I asked about him hauling our logs off.
Sounds wonderful. The college should have provided free counseling and free changes of underwear to all the poor little boys and girls traumatized by the event.
I pastor a church in Maine and our fir/pine/hemlock and the hardwoods are not real big around the base because of normal harvesting. One rock maple was 5 1/2 feet across but it was already down and hollow for the first 20 feet. My one surprise was a nest of snakes in the hollow log (but they were garter snakes) it was a ‘first for me.’ We do have a man in church with a woodmizer and he gets a number of the good logs.
We practiced our Escape and Evasion.
The fireball at the bottom of the tree was white on the inside and orange further out. It went boom when the illuminated shock ring reached us. The tree looked like it had been cut down with a sledge hammer.
Only by accident, have I never cut down a tree in the wind. That is a chilling revalation.
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