This is the second of three pages of pictures from our logging project. Click on the navigation links below to go to another page.
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| The Kubota was amazingly powerful for its size. Many of the logs I could outright lift. Other, I could yard with a choker on the log and a chain wrapped around the bucket. You can see a choker hanging from the log in this picture. | This was an intermediate phase of the cleanup - getting the branches into enormous piles to clear pathways through the mess. Here you can see there's now "road" of sorts that reaches around the house. | More piles of branches. | Once we had most of the logs loaded out, the cleanup could begin in earnest. The chipper got a good workout. Soon, there will be piles of chips everywhere. |
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| Piles of branches turned into piles of chips... | ...and more piles of chips. | Deer enjoyed the fresh browse. | While cutting a twinned spruce, Jack encountered a glass bottle embedded between the two trunks. Who knows what the history of that bottle is. The bottle unfortunately immediately dulled his chain. |
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| Jack had other work lined up for a few days. We were starting to get a handle on the cleanup, and I was almost ready to say "that's enough - we'll remove the rest next year". But I didn't, and today they're going to take down the enormous spruce and fir trees on the North side of the house. | This is the smaller of the two (the fir) coming down. | The mess left by the big spruce and fir nearly brought me to tears. That mountain of hoary spruce branches had to be cleaned up right away to get another truck around the back. | Mo's brother Pat came over to watch the big ones come down. He's standing on the spruce stump. |
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| Yup - four and a half-feet across. | This was a staged photo for fun. Other than the fact that I wouldn't even consider falling such a large tree, can you spot the obvious technical problem here? Hint: How can you cut through a 4-1/2 foot diameter stump with a 18" saw bar? | Jacy helps me take a break from the cleanup. | This is the fir tree, that was a little smaller at about three and one-half feet at the stump. |
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| On the spruce stump. | Man that's a lot of branches to clean up! | Mo and I pose next to the big spruce. You can clearly see the diameter of some of those branches - they were "logs" in and of themselves! | To get one of the trees near the garage, Jack's son (Jack Jr.) uses a lift truck to limb the tree to the top... |
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| ...then drops the top off.... | ...and the rest of the tree comes down like a telephone pole. | Once I got a path cleared through the spruce branches, Earl returns for another load in the back. You can see the steam coming out of the large chip piles. Natural decomposition was keeping them toasty warm inside! | Another pretty good sized log I was able to yard out of the pile with the excavator. |
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| More excavator work. | If I couldn't lift the logs out, I would choker them up and try to drag them free from the mess. | I didn't leave Earl a lot of room to negotiate his way around the house.... | ...rounding the corner at the back... |
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| ...and threading his way between the house and garage. | We were left with some pretty ugly, but very big, logs that had marginal commercial value. I hired Steve Anderson to haul them away just to get rid of the mess. I wish I had a picture of the ton of water that came running out of a twinned fir when Steve busted the two trunks apart! | To make room for the trucks, I just piled up all those spruce branches next to the garage.... | ...and later spent an afternoon cutting them into firewood chunks. |
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| The spruce limbs make superior firewood. Look carefully at the ring density on the spruce limbs - the rings are as tight as a hardwood tree! | Compare the spruce limb density with these rings on a fir trunk. | Mom and Dad came down for a few days to help me with the cleanup. Dad's feeding the chipper here. | One of the final stages of cleanup is getting rid of the stumps. Here, I'm cutting the "cap" off a stump to get it down to ground level where I can attack it with the stump grinder. |