Charge every drop.

Today was a truly epic day.  We accomplished something we first said we would never even attempt by ourselves, and we learned a ton in the process.

Our surfing friends recently enlightened us on a phrase thrown around in the surfing world; "charge every drop." While surfing, this means to paddle hard at great waves, no matter how big and intimidating they might be. Give it your all and drop into the wave and the ride of your life. Today we took that phrase to a different level and tackled a hung up tree that scared us. We decided to take on a challenge, learn from the process, and hope for the best. So, charge every drop!

On Thanksgiving, we had fairly high winds in our area.  We had been inside cooking all day, but when our guests arrived, everyone kept commenting on the big tree that was hung up at the top of our road.  A big maple had been uprooted by the wind, but it didn't fall all the way to the ground.  It was hung up on a bunch of smaller trees.  For foresters, they call trees like this 'widow makers' because they are pretty tough and dangerous to bring down.  The lean of the tree changes all the dynamics of how it will fall, and there is a lot of tension in the tree making it easy for the tree to go very quickly without any warning.  Today, we successfully tackled our first widow maker, and here's how it went:

We've been calling her mega maple.  It isn't as horizontal as many hung up trees, and the fact that it is uprooted as opposed to broken off makes it a challenge as well.  The root ball was fairly secure still, so that changed the dynamic as well.  We were anticipating the the root ball would fall back down, but that didn't end up being the case. Hindsight is 20/20, and we would have cut it differently had we known what was going to happen.

Dr. Trafton -- ready to tackle the tree.  Actually we were both pretty nervous.  Anna was going to take the first stab at it, but I wasn't going anywhere.  This is definitely a task requiring supervision (as are all chainsaw activities in our book).

First task -- clear the area.  You always want to make sure you have an escape route.  We cut and cleared all the small trees to Anna's right and a few on the other side of mega maple.  

The first cut -- the plan was to cut a wedge in the top, then cut up the bottom side to meet the wedge.  This creates a hinge in the tree, and the root ball falls back while the bottom of the tree falls down.  Again, things didn't go as planned.  The root didn't fall back into place, and so the tree just got stuck where it was.  There was nowhere for it to go.  More on that later.

More work on the wedge -- the final wedge was much larger than what it looks like here.

The final wedge.  It's not perfect, but our skills are getting better.    

The next move is to cut into the side of the tree opposite the wedge in a straight line to the point of the wedge.  I apparently was too nervous to take any pictures of this, but let's just say Anna did a great job. The problem was that the root ball didn't want to go anywhere, but the tree wanted to fall down.  So, the bottom edge of the tree was being stopped by the stump.  Ugh.  What are we going to do?  Naturally, we called upon the strongest member of our farm team…Charlotte. 

Sorry it's sideways!

Oh hell's yeah!  You can see the root ball in the background -- that thing didn't move!  We later cut it down to the stump as there's no reason to leave perfectly good firewood just sitting there.

After this, we limbed the tree and cut it into logs that we could drag down to our drying pile.  They'll stay there until we buck and split them in the warm spring sun.  Then, they'll sit there a long time longer drying so they're ready for burning 2 winters from now -- hopefully we can have enough wood to start actually being a year in advance.

And now, it's cocktail hour. :D