If you ever get the opportunity to see a professional lumberjack at work, don’t pass it up.

We have quite a few trees on our property. Some of them were growing in the place we’d designated for our house, others blocking the southern exposure we needed for good passive solar and others were where we want our garden to be. I bought a chainsaw back in October and I’ve been putting it to good use, getting used to how it works and taking down trees as I could. I figured I’d get the hang of it on the small ones (4-10 inch diameter trunks) then work my way up to the big ones (30-36 inch diameter trunks)…

My parents were up in the area back in February and my Dad and I were out on the property working on dropping some trees and getting it more cleaned up. We decided to take on one that was bigger than I’d done before – probably 14″ diameter trunk. Well, getting it down involved:

1. chainsaw
2. a plastic wedge when the chainsaw got stuck
3. a hammer and stake when the wedge got stuck
4. a bow saw to finish the cut and free the chainsaw once we got the wedge out

And then, the tree didn’t fall all the way to the ground – it hung up in another tree.

See, when you’re standing on the ground, looking up at those trees, they don’t look that big. I mean, yeah, they look big, but you look up at it, you look at the space around you, and you think Yeah…this will fit, here, no problem. And then, it’s ever so much bigger than you thought…

After that episode, I figured that if I took the time necessary to work myself up to the big trees, we wouldn’t be building for another 5 years or so and it was time to get professional help. We know a contractor in the area and he’s got a lot contacts so I drove up on Friday to meet with some people about dropping the trees.

They were really great guys and agreed to drop them for a really good price. We’re talking more than 2 dozen trees most of them over 18″ diameter trunks and some over 100ft tall. They’d put them on the ground and limb (cut the branches off) and buck them (cut the trunk into chunks) and then I’d just have to clean up the slash ( limbs and trunks that they cut off – no small amount of work). Fortunately, they said that they could do it on Saturday so I got to watch and learn some tricks to felling.

Here we are, just taking a break and discussing the work.

They’ve already made the front cut and now are working on the back cut. Notice the diagonal on the very front bottom of (what will be) the stump? That’s to help it fall better and get a clean break.

Now they’re pounding in wedges to help control the tree’s fall and make it go where they want it to.

And over it goes.

It was truly remarkable how they did it. All these trees perfectly lined up with each other on the ground. They didn’t get moved this way after they were down, this is where they fell.

Once a tree is down, they walk up the tree with the saw to limb it. They’ve got this neat trick where the let the tip of the saw rest on trunk and just “walk” it up so that they don’t have to carry the saw.

Oh, and to drop all these trees and do all this work was about 3 hours. It would have taken me a whole lot longer.