Dropping trees, then limbing, splitting, transporting, and stockpiling the wood is risky work. Logging usually is ranked among the top two or three most dangerous occupations by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the three decades I have been heating with fuel taken from my wood lot, I have escaped serious injury as much by luck as by any foresight or prophylactic practice. Each close-call does instruct me and I now can read certain clues to preserve my fragile flesh. I have had trees pivot on the stump, shiver (I wrap hickories with chains to prevent this), tear off and drop overhead limbs, and kick backward. I have become far more willing to sacrifice equipment in order to ensure my physical integrity. Each year when chainsaw season rolls around, I enter the woods with a bit more experience and greater confidence that I will emerge in one piece. And every year something happens that reminds me there are many surprises in the applied physics of bringing several tons of vertical cellulose to stable repose on the forest floor. The last large tree I felled taught me something new. I needed to drop a dying ash in a tight space. I would have to quarter off the natural lean of the tree to fit it between an even larger pignut hickory at 12 oclock and a huge beech at 2 oclock. In between was a maple with a trunk about the size of my waist. A perfect drop would put the ash between the maple and the beech with only minimum damage to each. It was not a perfect drop. The ash came down directly on the maple. So directly it split the maple perfectly down the middle. Why it didnt just knock it down, I have no idea. The trunk of the ash lifted off the stump and its thickest twenty feet was held six feet off the ground by the base of the maple. I cleaned up the maple first and was left with an y-shaped natural sawbuck that was keeping my ash out of the dirt. I sectioned off rounds of ash, each about two feet in length. When I reached the part wedged in the split maple, the diameter of each section was about two feet. I would estimate each of rounds I was now cutting as weighing close to one hundred pounds. It was clear that when I made my first cut on the other side of the fulcrum that was the maple, the trunk of the ash would be free to finish its descent. I rolled one of the rounds Id already cut under the ash to avoid a drop that could lead to any number of disasters. But there was an eventuality I had not considered. When I made the cut on the far side of the maple, I removed the connection between the new round I had just created and huge mass that was the rest of the tree. The maple, which was under tremendous tension in trying to return to its original alignment, now had something it could lift. The two parts of the maple snapped back together and launched that hundred-pound round of ash straight into the air. I dropped my saw and ran for the beech. I figured if I could duck behind it, the round would have to go over the top of the tree to drop on my head. I heard the chunk of ash thump down just as I cleared the beechs bole. It landed a foot from my saw. I have one more tree that needs to come down, and then I will be through cutting for the year. I am hoping for a boring drop and uneventful sectioning. I burned my reserve adrenalin already.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 02:42:59 +0000
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