Vanderbrew

I received an email from someone over the weekend whom I haven’t heard from in a while. A few years ago we went on a camping trip together and incurred some very unseasonable weather.

In his email, he proposed another trip for this summer and it totally awakened my wanderlust. Now it’s probably not wanderlust like most of my readers are used to, but I love it. Back in 2004/2005 I was really busy and went on lots of trips, but things have slacked off a bit in the outdoors front since then. There’s a couple other trips that aren’t on there but the last two years were nothing like the two before them.

Anyway, the trip Greg suggested is a possible climb of Mt. Gabb and I spent some time this morning going over a possible approach in my GPS software. I created an elevation graph of the hike to a possible base camp and exported the route to a Google Earth KML file.

The more I think about it the more excited I am, and I’m totally committed to making it happen.

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.

Well, I finally got the pictures posted for the trip that Adam and I took back in April. I wanted to move to a different solution for hosting the pictures and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted and then to do it.

I’m pretty pleased with the result. I’m using gullery from Geoffrey Grosenbach. I’ve got some grand plans for integrating my blog and photos and I needed a more dynamic platform for the photos to move it along.

Please let me know if you’ve got any suggestions about the gallery software or comments on the pics!

Over the weekend, my friend Adam and I went up to the mountains, camped in snow and climbed to the top of Round Top. Here’s a brief set of pictures until I get the full photo page setup. (Click on each picture to see a larger version)

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Still catching up on posting old photos. Here’s the latest from a trip we took back in June…

This is what happens when you get up one morning to look at pictures on the computer and realize that you haven’t been camping in a while… We decided to go at 11, were on the road by 1 and were at camp just west of Sonora Pass by 5:30. Originally it was just going to be a camping trip. We got up Sunday morning and drove up to Sonora pass for a look around. It was a beautiful day and we decided, hey, let’s keep going, we can go home over Tioga Pass - and so we had breakfast just west of Sonora Pass, lunch at Mono Lake, dinner in the Yosemite Valley and were home to sleep that night.

Photos