It had always been a daunting thought. For one thing, it had been put off for so long that the trees were huge. According to our best estimates, they were a little over 90 feet tall, at least! For another thing, cottonwoods are notoriously heavy with water. This makes them grow asymmetrically, which makes it extremely difficult to judge their weight distribution. It also makes their wood weaker than most other trees. All in all, cottonwoods are very dangerous to take down. And, if you a hire a professional to remove the trees, they're going to charge you extra for the difficulty involved. All of this explains why it was always a daunting thought and one that was put off year after year.
Until this year.
Our cousins from Idaho were amazing and volunteered themselves for the job. Now, timber has been in our family blood for a couple generations. And Rich really knows his way around a chainsaw. Oh, and he has a really large chainsaw. But nobody felt comfortable having Rich shimmy up and down those dangerous cottonwoods. So Grammy rented a boom lift for him to get up there with.
The plan - to take the tops off, one giant limb at a time, clean up the mess once on the ground, section off limbs to keep and shred the rest, take down the giant trunks one by one, and then slice them up into pieces we can later split for firewood. I figured the plan would take 3 and a half days to complete if we worked dang hard. Apparently the cousins thought 2 days was a better timeline and that working dang hard wasn't hard enough... Egads, we worked our fannies off!
The hours dragged by between sweating like pigs, wounding ourselves with protruding sticks, getting bit by ants and spiders, and watching Rich with our hearts in our mouths as he cut giant limbs while 50 feet in the air. It was a physically and nerve-wrenchingly exhausting 2 days. Considering it was late June in California, it was a sultry 90 degrees tops. The weather was fairly nice. But that harsh sun beating down on you can really deplete your energy - or at least it did for me.
Once the tops were down, it was "the ground crew's" job to start cutting and sectioning off the limbs into usable and unusable pieces. Mike did a lot of sawing at this point. Nancy, Lee, and I gathered the limbs and hauled them out of the way to be shredded. Eventually, Mike couldn't cut fast enough and Lee picked up a saw too. Once a patch of ground was cleared away, Rich would get back in the boom and fell some more of the tops. At this point it was a haze of hauling, lifting, tossing, scooping, shredding, and sweating. I barely remember it all. But I do remember the team work. Considering the fact that Mike, Lee and I have never-to-rarely done this type of work before, I thought we worked super well together. We looked out for each other, stepped in when anyone else was struggling, called out cautions to one another, and just plain worked well together.
When most of the limbs had been shredded, Rich focused on the trunks. Lee drove the truck that was attached to a line wrapped around each tree. When Rich signalled, or when it looked like the trunk was coming down, Lee floored it to bring enough momentum so that the tree would fall the way it should. This was probably the most nerve-racking part. Rich had to cut right at the base, and with the weight distribution difficult to gauge, there was no way to know for certain that the tree would fall where it should. On one tree, Lee didn't see Rich signal, even though he heard the CRACK! that meant the tree was falling. He hesitated a fraction of a second before gunning it and pulling the tree down, hoping Rich was safely out of the way. It all worked out. And pretty soon, all the trees were down.
Now came the truly fun part. Some of the trees were approximately 4 to 4 and a half feet in diameter. The saws weren't long enough to reach all the way through in one slice. This meant that most of the logs needed to be rolled so that the saws could get through. Did I mention that most of the trees were covered, or filled, with fire ant colonies? Yeah. No joke. So when we rolled, we were putting our hands, arms, shoulders, knees, and/or backs into a swarming mass of fire ants. Ah, good times, good times. Some of the logs we rolled were well over 200 lbs. Heck, some of the slices that were eventually sectioned off were over 200 lbs each. We're going to have some fun when we split those sections, let me tell you.
Well, when it was all said and done, we all had a sunburn and a galaxy of mosquito, ant and spider bites, with a motley splattering of bruises and cuts. A giant swath of Grammy's back yard is now filled with slices of cottonwood, a smallish pile of cut limbs, and a giant 10 foot by 8 foot pile of shredded cottonwood clippings. And no cottonwood trees. Whew!
Check out the slide show with videos. Be warned though - there are a couple expletives in there, mostly from me! Sorry. Oh, and if you have the patience to watch the whole thing, check out those ants and that mother of a black widow on the last slide. I TOLD you we had to deal with ants and spiders!
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UnMaintained Thoughts