Day four

It was good today, we started felling on the next bit of mountain down from the track, it's so stupidly steep you can barely stand-up. What with all the pine duff, heather, blow downs and rain it was quite slippy, however, I only fell down twice.

Throwing the firewood up is entertaining, I'm running out of strength and most of the logs I threw came back down again, one or two nearly landed on my head!!

One tree had a great deal of internal tension (rick's words), it was leaning one way, he made the mouth cut, and was making the back cut when it did that awful spiny thing, and lent back into the back cut trapping rick's big saw. Stupidly, (his words) he hadn't wedged the cut with poundable hardwood wedges, and the small saw (which is on it's last legs) had to come out and play (because he hasn't fixed his other big saw yet). This would all have been avoidable (rick said) had he been paying more attention to what was happening up top, instead of focusing only on the cut. He said, before he started, he didn't imagine it was going to be a problem, it looked set to go only one way. Just goes to show. He said, it's quite stressful when they sit back trapping your saw, they could go any which way, and you rarely have much idea how much meat's left, and how stable the thing is.

A few of the trees on the mountainside have seco, a deadly (for the pines) and very virulent disease that's plagueing this region, any tree affected needs to come out as a matter of priority. So far, all the seco hit trees he's taken out are all usable. Now is a good time to remove lumber, before the whole forest dies from this disease. There are a lot of standing-deadwoods around, rotting where they sit, after a while they're not even fit for firewood.

Here's a picture of rick's cutting list.



After 5 or 6 trees we called it a day, as we'd been in and out of the truck hiding from the rain



He has also asked me to post a different picture of clear cut as the last one was not a good example