extreme logging adventures

See that biggest tree? Apparently it just had to come down. The squirrels were digging under it, or something of the sort, and one side of it was diseased and rotting. The tree was leaning quite a bit to one side, and leaning more and more all the time. It was a threat to our cabin, and to ourselves even, it if fell unexpectedly and fell on someone or something it wasn't supposed to. So, we had ourselves an adventure. My grandma forbid my grandpa to knock it down while the kids and others were present, so we waited for her to leave on a four wheeler ride, and we got to work.

Now, I say we, but I was really just keeping Aiden well away for the tree, and taking pictures. These boys were the ones doing the work, or was it having the fun? You should have seen the big smiles on their faces. Like little kids playing a new game. One of them suggested we should have taped the whole thing and sent it into "Extreme Loggers". At one point Kenny leaned over to my grandpa (the man right by him in the red hat and blue jumpsuit) and told him that he might want to stand back, because, should the tree fall over in a direction they didn't want it to, he felt like he could outrun it, but wasn't sure if my grandpa could run as fast. But no, my grandpa wasn't going to miss the fun. So, he stayed.

They had to move the shed with the generator in it out of the way, because they were going to knock the tree over right where that shed sat. Then they cut a notch in the side they wanted it to fall on, then got to work cutting into the other side. It was exciting. I sat there, patiently waiting with my camera, for someone to yell "Timber!", but it never happened. I just heard a crack, and then it fell.


Down,

down,




down,
down.

Then all the kids converged on the stump to play, while the bigger kids and adults got to work cutting and moving limbs out of the way. The gigantic tree didn't actually fall right where the shed had been sitting, but it was right in the way of putting it back to where it should be. So then, we had to move a good portion of the tree out of the way to put the shed back.

One four-wheeler was too whimpy to move even a small section of tree, so we kind of log-rolled the logs with the four-wheeler and placed the couple of log sections with the wood pile. Now, we had spent all morning long chopping and hauling wood for the wood pile, and I thought it was quite a good pile before I saw it next to these two logs. The two small pieces of tree equaled the size of the whole wood pile.Then, it took two four-wheelers, one hooked on the back of another, to haul the shed back into place. it was quite the adventure.

One that Aiden was happy to be a part of. He loved that they knocked that tree down, and he was quite amazed that they were able to, because he had pushed and pushed on that tree, and it had not budged one bit.