Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
So I stumbled across this picture. Yes, it’s real.
It led to so many questions, like:
And of course the obligatory reference to Count Rugin, who needs to have custom gloves made for himself:
After the Thanksgiving wind storm, we’ve been waiting a little nervously for a couple weeks while that huge tree loomed over our house. Today it was cut down, along with six other trees in the yard that were “compromised” and likely to fall on the house in any future storms.
How do you (safely) cut down hundred-foot-tall trees? Well, it’s a pretty cool process to watch. Travis, the arborist, used a bucket truck to slowly ascend this beast, limbing as he went up.
The bucket truck couldn’t quite reach to the very top of the tree– here it is at full extension. But I guess it was enough, because Travis whacked off the top of the tree.
After that, it was a matter of bucking the tree all the way down. He’d cut a foot-long length of trunk and toss it to the ground, where it would make a satisfying thunk.
With maybe forty feet left, he dropped down to the base and toppled the remaining trunk into our driveway. I was a little disappointed he didn’t yell “Timber!“
The limbs and leaves went into an industrial chipper (the yellow machine above), and the logs– which are apparently called rounds in lumber lingo– went into a truck. Per our request, they’ll be donated to organizations around the valley who provide firewood for needy families this winter.
Trees near the house weren’t quite so easy; they had to be climbed. Travis put on some boots with massive steel spikes, a safety harness, and up he went. Again, he’d shave off limbs along the way.
It may not look all that impressive, but he’s probably eighty feet above the ground, and acts like it’s nothing. He wields his chainsaw with one hand, using the other to hang onto the branches and toss them to the ground so they don’t land on the roof.
It was sad to see a couple of the trees in a little grove in our backyard come down. They looked perfectly fine, but in his expert opinion, they were compromised and most likely wouldn’t survive another storm.
Here’s a good shot of Travis as he finishes limbing and starts working on taking down the crown of the tree.
I did some quick math. It took him around half an hour to remove one tree, and the bill for that will be a thousand dollars. That’s $2,000 an hour. Clearly I picked the wrong vocation! Even lawyers don’t charge that much. Then again, lawyers don’t come crashing through your roof during a storm…
Anyway, all’s said and done, and our yard is looking a little more bare. It’s a good thing we still have a gazillion (minus seven) trees in the forest all around us!
Every Halloween, I love buying Brach’s mellocreme pumpkins. For some reason they’re vastly better than “regular old” candy corn. Now here we are, mid-December, and I’ve finally reached the end of my bag of pumpkins. I guess I have to wait another ten months before I can have them again.
Pepper and I have slowly been improving at pool. Heck, we inherited a really nice pool table with the house, so we may as well use it, right? We play normal eight-ball, as well as nine-ball (which I prefer). Despite her repeated statements that she’s not very good, I can’t help but notice that Pepper wins at least half the time.
I took a few pictures (my so-called kameraspielen) of the action.
It’s a fun and easy way to spend ten or twenty minutes together. And we can actually tell we’re improving, which is nice.
Since we gave away most of our furniture prior to our move, we’ve been improvising a bit while we figure out what we’d like. A couple of weeks ago, Pepper and I found a nice dining set down in Missoula, and a (somewhat) matching coffee- and end-table set. We bought them, hoping to have them in time for Thanksgiving, but no such luck. They had to be shipped from Denver and then scheduled for delivery, and showed up the following week. Thus, we had Thanksgiving dinner at our 23-year-old table, sitting on Walmart folding chairs.
But now that the goods have arrived, they look fabulous. We have a nice table and chairs:
A couple of leaves expand the table to comfortably sit ten. We also have a coffee table for the party room:
And another coffee table and some end tables for the lounge:
I like how these tables incorporate some stone, which (sort of) matches the stone floor in the party room. It almost looks like it was intentional…
Bucking is the term for cutting a tree into manageable chunks, generally firewood-sized. Yesterday we decided to buck the two trees that are laying in our backyard. Here’s the “before” shot of the one that clipped the house:
And here’s what it looks like after I took our chainsaw to it:
Pepper worked on the second tree, first limbing it with our little electric chainsaw and then bucking it with the big saw:
Now we have to take all these firewood-length logs and split them into useable sizes. Luckily we know a guy.
I also sliced a few thin cross-sections of the tree, because Thom and Katie are going to do something with them. Here’s an example of one that’s around 16 inches across:
Maybe I’ll make a few more into cutting boards or coasters or a clock or something. It’s really nice wood, and I hate for it to go to waste.
More trees to come…
After the second windstorm, and receiving bids to have our trees felled and bucked (check out my tree lingo), we decided it would be cheaper to buy a chainsaw and do some of the work ourselves. Obviously we’re not about to fell a hundred-foot pine that’s leaning 30 degrees from vertical. But there are several smaller trees in the forest or near our driveway that we could probably take down. And those that are already on the ground just need to be bucked to stock our firewood pile.
So, chainsaw in hand, we headed out today to make some progress on the two trees still partially blocking our driveway. This thing was amazing— it cut through a 16-inch trunk like butter.
After maybe ten minutes of work, we’d cleared the first (big) tree in our driveway, and made short work of the smaller one afterward. Of course, the massive trunks are still laying in the yard, with ten-foot holes where the roots were, but that’s a problem for another day.
The sad thing is both trees were well over a century old, judging by their rings:
It’s a bummer that these giants stood for so long, only to give in right after we moved here. Stupid wind.
In September we had a crazy wind storm that took out three trees in our yard, including one that swiped the side of the house. Everyone told us this was unprecedented, including people who had lived in the area for thirty years or more.
Well, they say lightning strikes twice, but in this case it was the wind. The day before Thanksgiving we had a second wind storm that was just as fierce as the one two months earlier, except it lasted a full day. Winds gusted above 60 mph. We watched as trees in our yard swayed back and forth, tugging at the ground (you could actually see the ground heaving as the trees’ roots pulled at it). We were absolutely convinced that at least two of the trees were going to smash into the house, doing far more damage than the September storm because they were taller and closer to the house.
As it turned out, the enormous tree in our front yard tore loose and toppled. Pepper, Kyra, and I watched it fall (Pepper even caught it on video). It crashed through two trees downwind, clipping the top halves off both of them. The entire mess came crashing down into the driveway, and left a mammoth hole in the yard. Another tree fell across the next switchback in the driveway.
Here’s the tree laying across the yard. Note the huge boulder in the bottom right: that had been up at the roots of the tree (part of the landscaping along our sidewalk) and tumbled down the hill.
The wind howled all day and night. We hoped against hope that the two trees beside the house would hold. They did. When the wind finally abated on Thanksgiving, we surveyed the damage.
A tall pine beside the driveway collapsed. It didn’t damage anything, but it’s sad to lose such a pretty tree.
In our backyard, another tree had fallen (luckily not hitting anything at all). In the national forest behind us, we could see roughly a dozen trees down. Perhaps most precarious of all was the ponderosa pine leaning over our garage and the courtyard:
It’s at least a hundred feet tall. And yes, it’s really 30 degrees off vertical. If it collapsed, it would crush the garage and ruin the courtyard fence and much of the landscaping there. Luckily for us, the tree’s roots were holding and it was leaning slightly against an outcropping of rocks at the end of our driveway. When an arborist came to survey the damage, he told us confidently that the tree will hold for a little while. Taking it down will be a trick, but he should be able to do it with a bucket truck, sawing off the upper portion. That’ll be something to see.
There are five other trees in our yard that are “compromised” (in his words) and endangering the house. If we don’t remove them, the next wind storm will certainly take them down and crunch the house. All told, there’s around six thousand dollars of cutting and dismantling to be done. Atop that, there’s probably four thousand dollars of cleanup as we remove the massive root balls and fill the gaping holes with topsoil. Ouch.
Needless to say, it was a stressful day, but in the end the house wasn’t hit. I have friends who experienced much worse, with dozens of trees down and damage to their houses. The place across the street has a hundred-and-fifty-foot tree laying across its roof, and three others down in the backyard. Power lines up and down the highway were taken out by falling limbs. It looks like a hurricane ripped through the east side of the valley.
So, as I considered what I was thankful for this week, the fact that we escaped relatively unscathed was on top of my list. Yeah, it’s a mess, but it could be worse. Now we’ve bought a chainsaw, and over the next days and weeks we’re going to attack the fallen trees and clear them. On the bright side, we should have enough firewood to last a long, long time.